Odelina Proctor

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

In the minster close at Leeds, in the spring of 1567, a drover's wife delivered a daughter in a room above a cloth-dresser's yard, and the child was christened Odelina, an old-fashioned name that her mother, Anne Proctor, had taken from a great-aunt and refused to change. Odelina Proctor would become a dressmaker, would live to be sixty-three, and would spend her whole working life within a few streets of where she was born. She was not a vampire slayer, and it is one of the peculiar features of the White Ledger that its keepers gave her almost as much space as they gave her more dangerous sister. Her father, Dennis Nowell, was born in 1545 and worked as a drover, one of the men who walked cattle and sheep down from the Dales and across the Pennines to the fairs and the market yards of the towns. It was a life of long absences. He knew every drove road between Skipton and the Vale of York, every alehouse that would take a dog, and every farmer who would water the beasts for a penny. He came home in the autumn smelling of wet wool and horse, with news from the other side of the hills. Her mother Anne, born in 1541, was a spinner, and she kept the household by the sound of the wheel, which turned late into the evening while the two girls sat beside her sorting and winding. Odelina was the elder by a year. Her sister, Mary Proctor, born in 1568, was the child who watched the door, and Odelina was the child who watched the hands. She liked to see how a thing was put together, and by the age of seven she was pulling seams apart to learn how they were sewn. Leeds in those years was a cloth town in the making. The wool came down from the dales to be spun in the cottages, woven on the broad looms, and taken to the fulling mills on the becks, and the rough undyed kerseys were sold every week in the open market by the bridge. The Corporation would not receive its charter until the next century, but the merchants already ran the town in everything but name, and the great clothiers built themselves timber-framed halls with jettied upper storeys along Briggate. The church of St Peter, the old parish church of Leeds, stood near the cluster of streets where the Nowell household lived, and the vicar there enforced the Elizabethan prayer book with sober attention. The girls were taught their letters at a dame school, and Odelina proved better at reckoning than at reading, which was useful for the trade she took up. The house was struck hard in 1582. Anne Proctor died that year at forty-one, of a wasting cough that the neighbours attributed to the lint of the spinning room, and Dennis was away on the road when she was buried. Odelina was fifteen and Mary fourteen, and between them they kept the household together with the help of a neighbouring widow. Odelina was apprenticed soon afterward to a tailor's widow who worked out of a room near the Kirkgate, a woman who cut and fitted gowns for the wives of the wealthier clothiers, and she learned the whole of the craft in five years: the drafting of bodices, the fitting of stiffened stomachers, the setting of sleeves, the making of ruffs and the attachment of the fine, awkward hooks and eyes that held a fashionable woman together. Elizabethan dress was an architecture of many layers, kirtle, forepart, partlet and gown, and every one had to be cut, pinned and stitched by hand. Odelina liked the precision of it. She kept her needles in a silver case that her father brought her from York, and she never lent them. In the summer of 1588 she was twenty-one and finishing her indenture when the beacons were lit along the coast and the news of the Armada ran through the town. The clothiers hurried to raise money for the muster, the church bells rang, and the city seemed to hold its breath. Odelina remembered chiefly that the wives of the wealthy came to her in a panic wanting mourning gowns cut in advance, and that she made two dozen black sleeves in a week. When the danger passed she was given the credit, half a joke, of having been better prepared than the militia. Her sister's calling in 1589, in a sickroom, changed the household without changing its routine. Mary was called to the White Ledger and started to keep odd hours, and Odelina, who had a professional's instinct for what was being concealed, understood almost at once what had happened. She said nothing to their father. Instead she quietly began altering her sister's clothes: a deeper pocket in the skirt, a reinforced sleeve to hold a stake, a heavy waist-seam that could carry the weight of a pistol without showing. Because she made the garments herself she could hide the tools of a hunt in an ordinary woman's dress, and Mary always credited her sister's tailoring with having saved her life on more than one occasion. Odelina never touched a stake. She did, however, sit up late with a candle sewing linen bandages, and she kept a jar of salve for her sister's burns, and in the ledger's own phrase she was the second hand in the house of the first. By her thirties she had set up on her own, in a rented room above a chandler's shop, taking custom from the wives of aldermen and the daughters of small clothiers. She was known as an exact but pleasant mistress, without airs, who charged fairly and refused to cut a gown that she thought would make the customer ridiculous. She employed two girls in turn, each of whom learned the trade and moved on to better places. Her hands, said one of them years later, were as cold as a well but never once slipped. She never married. The ledger records no husband and no children, and when the question was raised by relations she is supposed to have answered that she already had a household to keep, and that her sister was harder to dress than a bride. The family rivalry with the House of Faulkner touched Odelina lightly, as it touched most non-slayers of her generation. The Proctors of Leeds knew that their Lancastrian cousins across the Pennines kept a Red Ledger to match their own, and that the two houses blamed one another for the escape of the Guest at Towton in 1461. Odelina heard the Wars of the Roses spoken of at the family table as if the fighting had ended the previous week, though it was already more than a century past. She thought it slightly absurd, and said so, but she also made a point of never using red thread in anything she stitched for her sister, a habit which the family took as tradition and which she took as taste. Her father Dennis died in 1606, aged sixty-one, having outlived his wife by twenty-four years, and Odelina was by then the head of what remained of the household. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns tested her trade. After James I came to the throne the fashions changed, the great ruffs grew wider and then fell, and the sickness of 1603 and the cold seasons that followed sent half her customers out of the town and the rest into black. She kept working, moved to a smaller shop when the rent rose, and sold her mother's spinning wheel to buy cloth. In old age she was a brisk, small woman with a stoop, who could still thread a needle by touch, and she outlived the queen she had been born under by twenty-seven years. Odelina died in 1630, aged sixty-three, of a fever, in the room above the chandler's where she had worked for a generation. Her sister Mary had been killed in an accident on the fells the year before, and it was a neighbour's daughter who sat with her at the end. The White Ledger records her as a supporter of the house, giving the figure of the garments she altered for slayers and the burns she treated, and it notes without comment that the last gown she finished was a plain grey one for herself. In the later Slayerverse chronicles she is remembered as the woman who sewed the pockets that let a vampire slayer walk the streets of Leeds looking like an honest wife.