Lettice Hutton Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Lettice Hutton Proctor was born in 1654 in Ripon, Yorkshire, the third child of a household that lived by pen, needle and loom in the years when England was learning to be a kingdom again. Her birth fell in the middle of the Protectorate, when the great houses of the North had been fined and quartered upon, and the Minster town of Ripon, with its hornblower who still sounded the watch each night at nine, had settled into a wary and Puritan-tinged quiet. She was baptised in the cathedral church, which had lost its choir and much of its glass, and she grew up with the sound of the horn in her ears, a habit of the town that she later said had taught her to count time by the thread rather than the clock. Her father, Henry Proctor, was a yeoman scribe who had followed the armies of the civil war as a clerk. He had written out muster rolls, quartering orders and pay lists for one side and then for the other, and he came home to Ripon with a fair hand, a bad knee and a deep dislike of anyone who spoke of glory. The Proctor family kept the White Ledger, the tally of vampires taken by the Yorkist side of the old rivalry with the Faulkners, and Henry, though he never took the field against the dead himself, was the household's keeper of paper: he ruled the columns, sanded the ink and copied fair the entries that his elder children brought him. Her mother, Ursula Hutton, was a dressmaker who worked from the front room, cutting bodices from patterns pinned to the wall and taking in gowns for the wives of Ripon's mercers and attorneys. From Ursula, Lettice learned that a household could be run on very little money if every offcut was kept, every seam was true and every customer was flattered a little. Lettice grew up alongside two siblings who were both vampire slayers. Roland Proctor, born in 1645, was nine years her senior and a serious, watchful boy who was already trailing men on the moor road at night by the time she could walk. Susannah Proctor, born in 1650, was quicker and lighter-handed, and she and Roland worked the Ripon and Nidderdale country together for years. Lettice was not called, and it is one of the odd facts of the White Ledger that the family never treated her as lesser for it. Henry set her to the ledger-copying when she was eleven, and she spent long winter evenings reading the entries her brother and sister brought home, learning to tell a true tally from a boast. She said late in life that she had understood the rivalry with the Faulkners better from the margins of those pages than any slayer understood it from the field. Her trade was weaving. Ripon in the later seventeenth century was a town of many small industries, from the spur-makers whose work was famed across the kingdom to the wool-combers and linen weavers who fed the markets of Wensleydale and the Vale of York. Lettice was apprenticed at fourteen to a master weaver whose loom stood in a low room off Kirkgate. She worked worsted and coarse linen, learned to dress a warp, to mend a broken end without stopping the shuttle and to judge a cloth by the sound it made when snapped. She was not gentle at the loom and the master's wife remarked that she beat up the weft as if she were settling a quarrel. By twenty she had finished her term and set up a loom of her own in the family's back kitchen, and the cloth she produced, a close, plain, durable grey with a fine blue stripe in the selvedge, sold well at the Thursday market. In 1673 Lettice married Harry Tempest, a schoolmaster and a vampire slayer, a match that surprised the Proctors only in its speed. Harry was twenty-two and taught the grammar school boys in a cold upper room, and he had met Roland on a night hunt when the schoolmaster, walking home, had put a lantern and a cudgel between Roland and something that had come off the fell. He courted her with books rather than ribbons, lending her a Latin primer she could not read and a herbal she could, and the first thing he ever said to her that she remembered was that her selvedge was the straightest thing in Ripon. They were married in the spring at the church in which she had been baptised and moved into rooms above a saddler's shop, where the loom took up half the floor and the boys' copybooks the other half. Harry's craft was slighter than his brother-in-law's and quieter than his sister-in-law's, but the household turned on him. He hunted at the edges of the White Ledger's map, in the market towns and along the coaching roads of Yorkshire where carriers and drovers travelled by night, and Lettice learned to read the signs of his nights out: mud to the knee meant the road, a torn cuff meant a close thing, a clean coat and a hymn under his breath meant nothing had come. She kept his gear in order, mending the leather he wore under his coat, and she sewed silver thread into the hems of his cuffs at a cost she reckoned honestly against her cloth. Their daughter Matilda Proctor Tempest was born in 1676, and Lettice wove the child's first blanket on the same loom that had made her marriage linen. Matilda was not called either, and lived to 1749, a long life that Lettice never saw the end of. The Glorious Revolution reached Yorkshire in the winter of 1688, when the Earl of Danby seized York for William of Orange and the northern gentry rose in a week. For Lettice it arrived as noise: soldiers passing the shop, bells rung out of turn, and Henry, then seventy, muttering at the fire that he had written down one king's downfall already and did not care to do it twice. The White Ledger, which had always held that the nation's quarrels were beside the point, made a note of the disruption. Lettice made a note of the price of wool, which rose. Her mother Ursula had died in 1682, and it was Lettice who now kept the front room for Henry, the two households merging as the old man's sight failed and his hand shook. He lived until 1691, dictating his last entries to her from his chair. The great grief of her middle years was the loss of Harry in 1693. He died at forty-two, and the family's account of it was that it came from an old wound taken on the roads and never wholly closed, and that the schoolmaster had gone on teaching until three days before the end. Lettice was thirty-nine, with a seventeen-year-old daughter and a loom, and she went on. She took in more work, wove blankets for the charity school, and became for a period the person in Ripon to whom the wives of the town brought their disputes about cloth. She refused offers to marry again, saying that she had been married to a straight seam once and did not expect to see another. She turned the ledger-copying into a small institution of her own, keeping the household's fair copies and lending Roland and Susannah a room to write up their entries after a hunt. She lived to see the accession of Queen Anne and the drowning of a good deal of the Yorkshire wool trade in the Union's shipping arguments, and she wove on into her sixties, her fingers stiffening and her eyes tiring. In her last years a wasting illness took her strength by degrees; she lost weight and colour through the winter of 1716 and died in 1717 at the age of sixty-three. Her daughter Matilda saw her buried in Ripon beside her mother and father. The White Ledger records her not for any tally but for a line written in Henry's old hand and continued in Matilda's, noting that the household's fair copies had never once been lost or altered during her keeping. Remembered in the Yorkshire branch as a weaver, a keeper of paper and the only Proctor of her generation to hold the ledger house together through two deaths, Lettice Hutton Proctor stands in the Slayerverse as an example of how the rivalry with the Faulkners was carried as much by patient hands as by hunters. Her selvedge stripe of blue is said to have survived in family cloth for a century after her death.