Marion Hodgson

Spouse of Ninian Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Marion Hodgson was born in 1536 at Whitby, in Yorkshire, the daughter of a seafaring town, and she died at Wetherby in 1610 after a winter cough, having spent seventy-four years making nets and, for twenty-eight of them, being married to a vampire slayer. She is the sort of person who appears in the White Ledger only as a line in the margin, and yet the family's memory of her is vivid, because she was the woman who always waited up. A slayer family is only as sound as the household behind it, and in the case of the Proctors of Wetherby, the household was Marion. Whitby in her girlhood was a small harbour town of red roofs and crooked yards on either side of the river Esk, with a great ruined abbey on the cliff above and a flight of steps, nearly two hundred of them, climbing to it from the town. The people lived by herring, cod and the carrying trade along the coast, and the town smelled of tar, smoke and fish. Marion's father was a boatman and her mother a net-mender, and the children were set to work as soon as they could hold a netting-needle. By seven she was knitting twine into mesh on a wooden gauge at her mother's knee. By twelve she could make a herring net from the first knot to the last in the course of a week, and by sixteen she was tying nets for the boats and doing it better than most of the women on the quay. It was a trade of knots and patience, and it formed her mind. A net is made of a million small decisions, each one a loop and a pull, and a single slack knot in the wrong place will let the whole catch go. She was exact. She was also a talker, as a quayside girl must be to be heard above the gulls, and she had a ready, bantering tongue and an unshakeable good humour that made her popular on the staithe. She learned the weather by the colour of the sea and the smell of the wind, and she learned that the people who went out in the boats did not always come back. There was a girl's grief in it that she did not outgrow. In the late 1550s, with the religious upheaval of the age still shaking the Church and the parish, she came inland to the autumn fair at Wetherby, with a bale of herring net and a sample of cod-line to sell to the carriers and the dealers of the Great North Road. She had been sent by her mother, who had a cousin in the town, and it was meant to be a three-day trip. She was standing at her stall in the market square arguing over the price of a net with a calm, large, slow-speaking man in a carrier's coat when she noticed that he had begun to smile. This was Ninian Proctor, who was a horse-breaker and who had come to buy twine for a halter and stayed to be out-argued. She sold him his twine at a fair price, and then, since he did not seem to want to leave, she sold him several yards he had not intended to buy. They were married in 1559 and she made her home in the Proctor house behind the market place, a long, cobbled, noisy yard full of horses, hay and relations. His mother, Elspeth Thorne, was still alive and still keen-eyed; his sister Grizel Proctor, the midwife, was fresh from her apprenticeship, and his brother Wilfred Proctor, the farrier, was a gangling youth with his father's smile. The household took her in readily. She could not have said how long it was before she understood what the family did, since nobody sat her down to tell her, but she could count, and she could notice, and she was never a stupid woman. She saw that Ninian went out at night with a bag. She saw that his dogs lay across the door. She saw the stakes seasoning in the chimney. She said nothing for a year and then asked him over the supper-table, with a perfectly even voice, whether the thing he hunted was the same as the thing the Whitby fishermen whispered about on the long winter nights. He took a long time to answer. Then he said that it might be, and she said that she thought she had better be told the whole of it. She was told about the White Ledger, and about Towton, and about the Guest who had passed through the lines in the winter of 1461 and about which Yorkist and Lancastrian ledgers disagreed to this day. She learned of the Faulkners of Lancashire, with whom the Proctors had a long and courteous and unresolved quarrel, a rivalry of tallies and reputations in which nobody had been killed. She thought it a ridiculous quarrel, as outsiders do, and said so, and was told that most of the family agreed with her. She did not become a slayer. She became something more useful in the long run, the keeper of the household's nerve. Their daughter Eleanor Proctor was born in 1561. Marion brought her up in the yard and on the quay of her own imagination, telling her about Whitby and the abbey and the boats, and sending her out at dawn with a jug to the dairy. Her net-making went on throughout, in the room over the stable, and she sold to the carriers and to the river-men of the Wharfe, and in time to the drovers and the fowlers, for there were nets to be made for almost every purpose in the north. A bird-net, a fish-net, a hay-net, a net to hold a horse's feed. It paid for a good deal of the household. It also, at need, supplied the family with a particular sort of weighted net, made of cord soaked in lye and knotted tight, that Ninian used to pin a creature at a doorway for the length of time it took to bring a stake. She made them in a single night when asked and never discussed their use. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 came to Wetherby on the road, and the town was crowded with armed men for a season. Marion kept the yard gate barred, the horses in the loft, and the child in the kitchen, and managed to feed forty strangers on a small and shrinking larder without letting any of them see the ledger case, which she had wrapped in a spare net and hung in the yard well. When the soldiers had gone she hauled it up, dried it by the fire, and wrote a small note on the back of the last page to say that it had been to the bottom of the well and come to no harm. The note is still there. She was a widow from 1587, when Ninian was killed in an ambush on a lonely road. She was fifty-one, and she did not cry in front of the family; she put on her husband's old coat, walked out to the road, and spent a day there without eating, and then came home and set the table. She never remarried. Her daughter Eleanor was twenty-six and out of the house by then, and Grizel and Wilfred, her husband's sister and brother, were near at hand. In the Armada summer of 1588, when the beacons were lit one by one along the hills, she watched from the stable loft and said that she knew from the way the fire burned which hill it was, as she once knew the boats from the way they sat on the water. Whitby, she said, had never had the benefit of a good beacon. She lived another twenty-two years, long enough to see a good deal of the household pass on. In the winter of 1610 she took a cough that she did not shake off. She sat by the fire in the kitchen with a net on her knee, tying the last of a long length for a drover, and she did not finish it. She died that February, aged seventy-four, and was buried beside her husband in the churchyard at Wetherby. The net was finished by a neighbour and sold. The family kept the netting-needle. Marion Hodgson is remembered in the Proctor family as the Whitby net-maker who held the household together, a woman who married into a slayer family and never once let it go slack. In the Slayerverse she stands for the knot that holds: the household behind the hunter, the lit window, the patient hands, and the small, exact work on which every large thing hangs.