Margery Armitage

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

Margery Armitage rose before the light every day of her working life, and the cows of Knaresborough rose with her. She was born there in 1523, in Yorkshire, in a mill-house on the River Nidd where the water-wheel never entirely stopped, and she died in 1589 in an accident on the fells, at sixty-six, on ground she had walked since girlhood. She was a dairywoman, unmarried, and a Proctor on her mother's side, which in the Slayerverse is quite enough to place her inside a slayer family. She never carried a stake, but she carried milk, butter, cheese and a great many secrets to a great many doors, and the doors were not all ordinary ones. Her father was Giles Armitage, a miller, a big, floury, even-tempered man who ground corn for half the parish and was said never to have lost his temper at a customer. Her mother was Alice Proctor, a glover, born in 1499 into the Wetherby household of Jeremy Proctor and Agnes Barlow, the shepherd and the spinner-turned-vampire slayer, so that Margery was their granddaughter on the mother's side. Alice had been taught the glover's trade in a house where every skin that arrived was held up to the light and examined for flaws, and she brought that same scrutiny to her children. The mill-house was cramped, noisy and warm; the wheel boomed, the stones rumbled, and the front room smelled of meal-dust and dressed leather. A younger brother, Piers Armitage, born in 1526, completed the household, and the two children grew up as close as a pair of hands. She was the practical one. Where Piers was a boy who watched everything and said nothing, Margery was a girl who did everything and said whatever came into her head, and their mother used to remark that between them they made one tolerable person. By twelve Margery could milk, churn and press as well as a woman twice her age, and she had begun to carry her mother's gloves to market along with the neighbours' butter. A farm on the hill above the town kept a small herd of red cattle, and its mistress, a widow, took the girl on as a dairymaid. By twenty she was running the dairy herself, and by thirty she had her own leased pasture and her own small string of beasts. It was hard, cold, early work, and she was proud of it. Her cheeses had a name in the Knaresborough market, a firm pale cheese with a slightly sour rind, and the butter she stamped with a plain thistle was sold in York as far as the Minster close. A dairywoman moves through a landscape that few others see. She goes out before dawn and comes back after dusk, she crosses fells and pastures in all weather, she knows every byre and shieling for ten miles. She sees the odd light in the abandoned chapel, the sheep that will not graze beside the old quarry, the farmer's boy who comes down from the high pasture grey and silent. Margery saw such things and, because her grandmother's blood ran in her family, she knew what to do with them. She did not go and look. She went home and told her brother. Piers, whose calling came in 1552 in a churchyard at night, soon had a network of reports that no hired spy could have matched, and a good part of that network was his sister's milk round. A dairywoman can call at any door without being asked why, and she can leave a pail behind her and return for it the next day. The family said afterwards that half the entries in the White Ledger from the Nidd country carried Margery's tally-mark in the margin, a small cross with a pot-handle, though she never wrote one of the entries herself. Her mother had told her the family story, as every Proctor girl was told it, that at Towton in 1461 the Guest had slipped through the Yorkist line and the Faulkners of Lancashire swore a Proctor had let it go. Margery treated this as she treated most quarrels, with a snort. A Lancashire cheese, she said, could be judged by tasting it, and so could a Lancashire claim, and nobody had ever sent her a piece of either. She never married. There were offers, certainly, and one that her mother pressed with unusual force: a prosperous grazier from the dales, a widower with five children and a house in need of a woman. Margery thought about it for a week and declined. She said, in her blunt way, that she had cows enough to look after, and she was not minded to add a husband's temper to a farm's. Alice, who had married for love and found it lasting, was disappointed but not surprised. Margery stayed in the mill-house, and later in a small cottage by the pasture, with a dog, a cat and a succession of maids, and it did not seem to trouble her. She was fond of company and lively at a christening, and a good many young women of the parish came to her for advice that no one else could be trusted to give plainly. Her life was not narrow. It simply had a different shape from the one the neighbours had planned for her. The middle of her life fell across the years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from about 1549 to 1560, when the church of Knaresborough was altered, then altered back, then altered again, and when the old churchyard customs were broken and mended by turns. For Margery the change meant a good deal of nonsense that she disliked and a few real problems that she did not. Burial grounds were left untended while priests argued, and the sort of dead who should have been watched were sometimes simply left. She kept her pails moving. In the spring of 1556 she noticed that three calves had sickened on a stretch of pasture beside a derelict chantry, and instead of blaming the grass she walked to her brother's lodging and put the matter plainly before him. He went with a lantern. The calves recovered, and the chantry was watched thereafter. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 reached the Nidd country in the dark of the year. Soldiers and rebels alike came through Knaresborough, and neither paid for cheese. Margery fed both with the same hard-eyed courtesy, and when a party of the queen's horse arrived to seize stores she hid the best of her dairy in the mill-race. She was forty-six, and she thought the whole matter a foolish business that would be paid for by people who made butter. A number of her neighbours were fined or imprisoned afterwards; she was not, because she had been so plainly useless to everyone. It was a form of cover she cultivated all her life, the look of a dairywoman who knew nothing of anything beyond her pail, and it served her better than any cunning. She watched Piers settle into his own work and his own household, and she watched their parents age and die: her father in 1555, a few years after Piers took up the stake, and her mother in 1568. After her mother's death she took on the glover's tools, the lasts, the awls and the narrow knives, and for several years she dressed gloves in the winter months when the cows were dry. The Armitage house became a small, odd, resourceful establishment, gloves in the loft and cheeses in the cellar, and a place where, on certain nights, a slayer could always find a hot meal and a dry cloak. It was said that she kept a loaf by the door for her brother, covered with a cloth, every night of her life; he never once failed to take it. She died on the fells in 1589 in the autumn, when the mist came down on the high pasture before she could bring the beasts in. The accident was an ordinary one, a slip on wet stone above a drop, and her body was found by a shepherd the next morning with the dog sitting beside it. She was sixty-six. Her brother had died eight years before, and the mill passed to people outside the line, but the pasture she had rented was kept up in her memory for years. The people of Knaresborough said afterwards that she would have hated the fuss and would have been furious to be taken by weather, which she had never trusted. Margery Armitage is remembered in the Proctor family as the dairywoman whose milk round was the best intelligence network the Nidd country ever had, a woman who found the dead where others found only cows. In the Slayerverse she stands for the unmarried, uncredited, ordinary relatives of a slayer family, the ones who worked at dawn and in the cold, saw what the slayers could not, and kept the White Ledger fed with facts long after the Wars of the Roses had faded from living memory.