Matilda Proctor Tempest

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

Every night at nine o'clock, in Ripon, a man stood in the market place and blew a great curved horn at the four corners of the obelisk, and every night for as long as anyone could remember the townspeople had taken this as proof that the place was watched. Matilda Proctor Tempest was born there in 1676, in a narrow house in the shadow of the minster, and she went to sleep every night of her childhood to the sound of the Wakeman's horn. The custom, so the town said, went back to Alfred's day and was meant to keep the peace of the night. In her family it was understood to mean something a little more particular, and her father, who could hear the horn from the schoolroom window, used to say that a town which sounds a watch every evening is a town that knows what it is watching for. Her father, Harry Tempest, was the schoolmaster, a spare, grey-eyed man who taught Latin and arithmetic to the sons of Ripon tradesmen in a room off the minster yard. He was also a vampire slayer, known in the White Ledger as the Flint Sentinel, and he had earned the name from his habit of standing motionless in a cold churchyard for half a night waiting for something to move. Her mother, Lettice Hutton Proctor, was a weaver who worked at a broad loom in the front room, weaving the wool and linen mixtures that made up much of the town's trade before it turned to spurs and hemp. Lettice was the Proctor in the marriage, and her name went onto her daughter as a middle name by the custom of the line, so that Matilda carried the whole of the Yorkist inheritance in her name, descending as she did from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married at York in January 1486. Matilda was an only child and, in a household run on lessons and silences, a solitary one. She learned to read before she was five, to write a neat, slanted hand before she was seven, and to keep a page of figures accurately before she was ten. Her father, who had no son, made no distinction and taught her the same things he taught the boys. She learned also what the ledger was, and what had been entered in it, and by the time she was twelve she could recite the outline of the White Ledger from Walter Proctor's first entry in 1455 down to the recent names, in the flat, unhurried voice that was the family's way of memorising. She was not, however, called. There was no night on which something came to her at a graveside or a wake and marked her out. She waited for it, in the way a person waits for a knock, and it did not come. Her father died in 1693 when she was seventeen. He was found on the moor road beyond Studley, on a cold morning, and the Proctors of the district, who knew what the road meant, kept the details close. Matilda saw him laid out. She was afterwards uncertain what struck her most, the stillness of the face or the fact that her mother, who did not weep in public, took the loom apart that afternoon and did not put it up again for a month. In the following years the two women lived on the small proceeds of the loom and the rent of a room, and Matilda, having no dowry to speak of and, as she frankly said, no inclination toward the kind of marriage available to a schoolmaster's daughter, apprenticed herself as a dressmaker. The trade suited her. In the late seventeenth century a dressmaker, or mantua-maker as the fashionable called it, cut and fitted the loose gowns that had replaced the stiff bodices of earlier decades, and Ripon, with its gentry families and its regular flow of visitors for the races and the assizes, gave her steady work. She learned to cut on the cross of the cloth, to pin a train, to make a lining hold its shape, and to judge a customer's temper from the first fitting. A tape-measure hung from her neck all day and a pincushion was tied to her wrist. She was a tall woman, upright, with a long face and dark eyebrows, and the clients said that she was severe and never wrong. In time she took a small shop on the street leading to the market place and employed two girls, and the shop, with its bolts of silk and stuff and its wide window onto the street, became a place where a great deal was said and heard. This mattered, because Matilda's chief service to the family was as a listener. A dressmaker sees the women of the district in their shifts and their tempers, and hears from them the news that men do not carry, and she heard of the woman whose husband had stopped sleeping, of the child who would not enter the barn, of the sudden pallor of a servant girl who had been walking the churchyard at night. She wrote these things down in a small cipher of her own devising, mixed in with the hemlines and prices, and passed them on to the hunters who came through Ripon on the coaching road. The White Ledger records a good many hunts in the first decades of the eighteenth century that began with a fitting at Matilda's shop. She was never named as a hunter and did not claim to be one, but the tally owed her more than it said. She never married, and she made no apology for it. There were offers, and one from a clergyman's son of some property that her mother pressed her to accept, but she refused it in the same dry manner in which she refused to alter a badly conceived pattern. The house in Ripon, and later the shop, were her territory, and she liked the discipline of it. She kept her mother with her until Lettice died in 1717, and after that she lived alone with a cat and a great cutting table fitted with a hundred pigeonholes, the town's women passing through her workroom like a long slow tide. The first Jacobite rising of 1715 touched her indirectly. In the autumn of that year the northern counties were full of rumour, troops passed through Ripon on the way to the fighting at Preston, and the town's gentlemen split according to their loyalties and their fears. Matilda made three gowns in a fortnight for a customer who was leaving for the south and did not wish to say why, and afterwards learned that the customer's husband had been a Jacobite, and that her own accounts had been read by someone. She burned the ledgers of her clients that week and re-copied them from memory. It was a lesson in how quickly a private record could become a public danger, and she treated the White Ledger with even greater care thereafter. She lived to be seventy-three. In 1749 a fever swept through the town, the kind that the older people, using the language of a previous century, still called the sweating sickness, and Matilda, who had nursed half the street through it, caught it in her turn and died within the week. She was buried in the minster yard, not far from her father, and the two girls she had trained inherited her patterns and her pins. She is remembered in the Slayerverse as one of the Proctor line's quiet keepers, the unmarried dressmaker whose shop was the listening-post of a market town and whose fine hand filled some of the ledger's best pages.