Whitby smells of smoke, tar and fish, and for seventy winters Oswald Proctor added the smell of tallow to it. He was born there in 1580, on the Yorkshire coast where the river Esk runs into the North Sea beneath the ruined abbey on the cliff, and he made his living as a chandler, supplying candles, lamp oil, rope, tar and ships' stores to the crews of the colliers and fishing boats that came in and out of the harbour. A Proctor of the White Ledger by blood, he was never called and never married, and he died in 1650 of a winter cough, aged seventy, having spent most of his life in one narrow shop above the quay.
His father was Blaise Proctor, a yeoman born in 1558, who farmed a holding on the moor above the town and sold barley and mutton in the market. His mother, Fenella Thorne, born in 1554, was a housekeeper who came from a northern border family of the House of Thorne, and she brought with her a wariness about the dark and a fondness for old ballads of the Northumbrian frontier. She managed the household, and, before her marriage, the house of a larger gentleman, and she ran the Proctor farmhouse with a rigour that her children remembered. Oswald had one sibling, a younger sister, Dionisia Proctor, born in 1581, a year after him, with whom he shared a bed, a cradle-song and a very long correspondence.
Whitby in those decades was a small port with a great deal of weather. The town clung to the cliffs on either side of the Esk, with steep lanes, red-tiled roofs and a flight of steps up to the church at the top. Its business was the sea: herring and cod for the fishing families, alum from the works along the coast for the dyers, coal ships from the Tyne that put in for shelter. Timber was scarce and good rope was scarcer. Storms, when they came, drove ships onto the scaurs, and the harbour bell was rung over the drowned. The place was more devout than most, and more suspicious. Mariners carried charms and refused to sail on certain days, and old women were consulted about the weather.
Oswald was a big, slow-moving boy with a broad face and a placid manner, who took to the harbour as a duck takes to a pond. At thirteen he went into the household of a Whitby chandler as an apprentice and learned the trade by the direct method of carrying things. Candles in that century were of tallow, boiled from mutton and beef fat and dipped or moulded on wicks of cotton or rush, and the smell in a chandler's shop was heavy and animal. Wax candles, from beeswax, were dear and used mainly in churches and great houses. He learned to render fat, to test a wick, and to keep a stock of lamp oil, pitch, tar, twine, canvas, ship's biscuit and salt beef in a shop where a captain might arrive at three in the morning and demand supplies for the tide.
By his early twenties he had a shop of his own, on a lane down to the quay, with a living room above and a loft where he stored rope. It was a good business. Sailors and skippers trusted him because he did not water his oil or shorten his measure, and because he kept a ledger of credit for men who might be away for a season. He gave credit generously, and he knew to the penny who owed him, and in forty years he lost very little. He was, everyone said, the most easygoing man on the quay, the sort who would hand a boy a candle in the dark and refuse payment, and who would sit half a night with a widow whose husband had gone down with his ship.
He was also a Proctor, and the White Ledger's business found its way into his shop. A chandler sees everything that comes in on the tide, and the vampires that stalked the Yorkshire coast came in with the ships. He kept his ears open for the odd cargo, the crew that had lost men in a way the master would not explain, the coffin-shaped box unloaded at night that no merchant would claim. He passed the word on to his cousins in York and Leeds, and when hunters came to Whitby they lodged over his shop and drew what supplies they needed from his shelves. Pitch made the best fuel for a burning; tallow candles kept a watch in the dark; long ropes and canvas made a net. He never carried a stake, though he kept one behind the counter, in the way that a shopkeeper keeps a cudgel.
His mother's family was another matter. Fenella Thorne's people, of the border House of Thorne, sometimes came south, lean men with the manner of those who had spent their lives on a frontier, and Oswald, who liked them, kept a dish of oatmeal and a bed ready for any that turned up. He learned from them the border ballads and something of the older methods of the hunt, and he passed both on to his sister Dionisia, who in 1598 married Wilfred Stansfield, a Leeds cooper, and moved inland. The two of them kept up their letters for forty years. Twice a year Oswald took a cartload of candles to Leeds and returned with news of his nephew and niece.
Oswald's mother died in 1595, when he was fifteen, and it marked him. His father Blaise followed in 1607, when Oswald was twenty-seven and already established in the shop. In those years the plague came and went along the coast, and the parish burned or buried what it could. Oswald kept the shop open when other tradesmen shuttered theirs, leaving supplies on the step for the households that could not come out, and it is one of the reasons his name was long remembered in Whitby. He also kept his own counsel about the Proctor business. The rivalry with the Faulkners of Lancashire, and the old grievance about the vampire the families called the Guest who had escaped at Towton in 1461, made him smile. He said that every family had its lost cargo, and that the trick was not to spend a lifetime looking for it.
He never married. It was not for want of chances; a Whitby shipmaster once suggested his daughter, and a widow with two children hinted for years. Oswald was content with his shop, his ledger and his view of the harbour from the upper window, and he was said to have preferred the company of the tide to that of most people. He took in a nephew's boy as an apprentice in his last years, and left the business to another chandler on the quay, with a note that the shelf at the back should always keep a stake.
In the winter of 1650 he caught a cough that would not lift. The east wind blew down the lane for weeks, and the sea fret came in each night, and at seventy years of age he could not shake it. He died in his own bed above the shop, the harbour bell tolling below for a boat that had not come home. He had no children. In the White Ledger he is entered not for a tally but for services, a line that reads that he lit the coast, and in the Slayerverse he is remembered as the Proctor chandler of Whitby, the man who kept the lamps burning on a shore where they were badly needed.
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