Mary Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Meek Shuttle. Craft: Quiet Confrontation.

Mary Proctor spent sixty-one years being underestimated, and she arranged her life so that this would continue. Born in 1568 at Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire, she was a weaver by trade, a plain, soft-spoken woman in a plain gown who sat at a loom in a narrow house near the minster close, and behind the shuttle she was the vampire slayer whom the White Ledger names The Meek Shuttle. Her method was to ask questions politely until the thing in front of her had nothing left to hide. She was the younger of two daughters. Her father, Dennis Nowell, born in 1545, was a drover who walked stock down from the Dales to the markets of the West Riding, and her mother, Anne Proctor, born in 1541, was a spinner whose wheel could be heard in the evenings through the whole row. Her elder sister, Odelina Proctor, born in 1567, would become a dressmaker. Mary grew up in a house that lived on wool at every stage, from the fleece hung in the loft to the thread stretched across the frame, and she absorbed the whole of the cloth trade before she could properly read. Leeds in her childhood was a busy, modest town of timber-framed houses climbing from the river Aire toward the parish church of St Peter, its market held on the bridge and along Briggate, its cloth sold on trestles in the open street by clothiers who carried their wares in on their backs. The town smelled of fuller's earth, urine, wet wool and woodsmoke, and the river ran a different colour depending on the dyers' week. Her mother's early death in 1582 shaped her more than she admitted. Anne Proctor was forty-one, worn out by cough and lint, and Mary at fourteen was old enough to keep house and young enough to resent having to. Her father was on the road for weeks at a time. It was a neighbouring woman, a widow who kept a loom, who taught Mary to weave, and the girl took to it with a kind of relief. The loom gave her a place to sit still where she could think. She learned to warp a frame, to thread a heddle, to throw the shuttle in a steady rhythm, and to spot a flaw in a woollen cloth from across a room. The trade valued patience above brilliance, and Mary had been born patient. By eighteen she was renting her own loom in a shared weaving shed by the Aire, working from before light until the candles ran low, and selling plain kerseys and narrow broadcloths to the Leeds clothiers. The calling came in 1589, in a sickroom, and it came without warning. A neighbour's child had taken a fever, and Mary, who was sometimes sent for because she was steady in a crisis, sat up with the family through the night. Toward morning the fever broke, the child opened her eyes and, very clearly, asked for the shutters to be closed against the dawn. It was not the request itself that frightened Mary but what she noticed in the room as she rose to do it: the way the mother had stopped speaking, the wrongness of the stillness in the other bed, and a smell she recognised from no farmyard or workshop. She asked, with great courtesy, whether the child had been visited by anyone in the last week. She kept asking, in the same gentle voice, until the answers began to contradict each other, and the thing in the corner of the room understood that it had been found out. She dealt with it with a hawthorn stake she had picked up from the hearth, where the family had set it as a fire-iron, and it was, she said afterward, the first and last time she raised her voice in a sickroom. She was twenty-one, and she had been called. Her father, who had known the family's secret from his own wife's line, put the White Ledger in her hands within the week. Like her contemporary Toby Faulkner across the Pennines, she had no mentor to speak of, and she learned her craft by doing it. The archetype the ledger gives her is the Detective, and her particular skill was called Quiet Confrontation, a method that grew from her demeanour and from her trade. She would arrive at a suspect house as a weaver looking for work or a neighbour offering help, and she would sit, and listen, and let the household talk. She noticed what people did not say. A thread that ran the wrong way through a story was as visible to her as a flaw in a cloth. She rarely drew a weapon until the confession, spoken or unspoken, was complete, and by then the vampire was often so unnerved by her calm that it made a mistake. Her gear was a matchlock pistol, hawthorn stakes, and a sealed ledger, a small book of her own with a clasp and a wax seal in which she recorded what she learned before it went into the great book of the house. She was the only slayer of her generation to keep two records, and the ledger keepers who came after admitted that hers were better. Her name, the Meek Shuttle, was given by the men of the weaving sheds, half in mockery and half in admiration. She never protested it. She walked the lanes of Leeds and the villages of the Aire and Wharfe valleys with a shawl over her head and a basket on her arm, and the vampires of the West Riding, who knew of the hunters in the manner of hunted animals, looked for the wrong kind of woman. Her tally through the 1590s was, by the ledger's account, respectable, and by the early seventeenth century it was among the largest that the Proctor house had recorded. She was known to take the difficult cases that other slayers had abandoned, the quiet and old ones, the ones that had learned to live in respectable houses, and she solved them by paying attention. She never married and had no children. The ledger says, rather drily, that she gave her attention to the trade and the hunt and had none left over. She lived for most of her life in the same narrow house near the minster close, in the years when the plague and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns pressed on the cloth towns. The sickness of 1603 emptied the market for months, the frosts of the following winters killed the sheep on the fells and pushed up the price of wool, and the weavers of Leeds went hungry more than once. Mary kept her loom running and her neighbours fed, and in the worst season she took in two orphaned children whom she taught to weave. Her father Dennis died in 1606, and she buried him beside her mother. Her sister Odelina, in the dressmaker's shop near the market, made her clothes for the hunt and asked nothing, and the two of them were closer than the rest of the Proctors ever knew. Her relations with the Faulkner house were formal and, in her case, unusually cordial. She followed the Red Ledger's fortunes by report and sent one careful, correct letter to a Lancashire counterpart, asking that the two houses agree to compare their accounts of the Guest without accusation. The letter was kept, unanswered, in the sealed ledger for years. She did not resent the silence. She thought the matter of Towton was one that would eventually be solved by evidence, and that the evidence was not yet in. Mary died in 1629, aged sixty-one, in an accident on the fells above Wharfedale. She had gone up on a raw afternoon in autumn to follow the trail of a vampire that had been seen near an abandoned lead working, and she lost her footing on a wet scree edge in the fading light. She was found by a shepherd the next morning. Her sealed ledger was still in her pocket, unbroken, and it was opened for the first time by her family. The Slayerverse remembers the Meek Shuttle as the woman who caught monsters with courtesy, and the weavers of Leeds still say that a good cloth is one without a flaw and a good neighbour is one who listens.