Percival Shackleton

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

Percival Shackleton was born in 1547 at Tadcaster, Yorkshire, the first child of Miles Shackleton, a carter on the packhorse roads, and Jane Proctor, a carder of wool. The town sat on the River Wharfe where the great road from London to the north crossed the water, and its air smelled of two things at once: the malt of the brewhouses and the burnt lime of the quarries that had supplied stone for York Minster. Percival grew up in a low house of limestone and thatch near the bridge, in the last months of Henry VIII's reign, when the monasteries had only lately been dissolved and the roads were still full of dispossessed monks, pedlars and men without masters. His mother's maiden name was Proctor, and although the family used the Shackleton surname, everyone in the household knew which ledger their blood belonged to. Miles Shackleton was known to the White Ledger's keepers as The Grey Tally, a vampire slayer who took his kills quietly and entered them in the Yorkist book in a small, careful hand. He worked as a carter because a carter could travel without explanation. With a string of packhorses loaded with wool, salt and lead he crossed the Wharfe, the Nidd and the Aire dales, and no innkeeper asked why he arrived after dark or left before dawn. Percival was not called. The family accepted this without shame, since a slayer needed people behind him who kept the house, paid the rent and told the neighbours convenient stories. Percival saw his father mostly in brief, tired returns, smelling of horse and wet wool, and he learned early to ask no questions at table. When Miles died in 1558 the boy was eleven, and the household passed into the hands of his mother, who carded fleeces in the back kitchen for a few pence a stone to keep the children fed. At about fourteen Percival was bound as an apprentice wool-comber, a trade that was as hot, greasy and unforgiving as any in the north. The comber worked at a heated comb-pot, drawing long-stapled fleece through iron teeth warmed over a small charcoal fire until the fibres lay straight and ready for the spinners. It was skilled work, protected by the guilds of the cloth towns, and the men of the trade kept Bishop Blaize as their patron and held an annual procession in his honour. Percival was taught to grease the wool, to judge a staple by the feel of it between thumb and finger, and to keep the teeth of his combs sharp and true. His master was a stern man in the minster close at York, where the guildhalls and the wool markets set the price for a whole county, and the young man walked back to Tadcaster on Saturday evenings with his wages sewn into his shirt. The trade suited him. He was patient, exact and quiet, with large scarred hands and a habit of humming psalm tunes under his breath as he worked. In 1567 Percival married Grace Metcalfe, a miller's daughter from Leeds, at a parish church on the Aire. The match was made with an eye to sense rather than romance, though it became more than that. A comber who had finished his term needed a wife who could manage a household, and a miller's daughter knew how to bargain with farmers, count sacks and keep accounts. Grace brought a small portion in coin and a chest of linen; Percival brought his freedom of the trade and a rented cottage with a garden. They set up in Tadcaster and later moved to a tenement near York, closer to the buyers. Two daughters followed. Grace Shackleton was born in 1569 and Quenild Shackleton in 1571. Percival is said to have chosen the second name himself, from an old family usage on his father's side, and the parish clerk spelled it three different ways in the register. The winter of 1569 tested him before his first daughter was a few months old. That November the northern earls of Westmorland and Northumberland raised their banners against Queen Elizabeth, marching south through Durham and into Yorkshire with Catholic priests and crosses at the head of their column. Many wool towns had sympathisers, and the roads filled with armed men and frightened families. Percival kept his head down, combed his wool, and told his wife they would owe no man an oath on either side. When the rising collapsed in December and the queen's officers hanged rebels by the score in the villages of the North Riding, he was one of the many quiet men who counted themselves fortunate. Old Yorkist habit taught the White Ledger's people to distrust every banner. The Proctors of that generation wrote nothing about the rebellion in their tallies, and Percival never explained it to his daughters beyond saying that the Wars of the Roses had taught his family how loyalty could ruin a household. His elder daughter was the practical child, and his younger, Quenild, was the one who listened at doors. From her early teens she asked about her grandfather's road journeys and the notches in an old tally stick that Percival kept in a box under the bed. He was reluctant, but the calling arrived in the family as it always did, and by the time Quenild was a grown woman she was a slayer. Percival took no part in her hunts and asked for no details. What he did was practical: he kept a dry room with a bolt on the door, provided cloth and thread for her gear, and lied with easy skill to the constable when he asked why his daughter came home at odd hours. He said many times that a hunter needed somebody to write to, and he kept faith with that idea for the rest of his life. His sister Thomasin, who lived a separate life as a teacher, was his closest confidante, and her death in 1588 saddened him more than any event of that busy decade. The Armada summer of 1588 found Percival at York, where the beacons on the hills were prepared with tar barrels and watchmen slept in their boots. Nothing came to the Yorkshire coast, but the city was swollen with militia drilling in the fields and merchants complaining of the price of shipping. Percival, now forty-one, watched a fire that never had to be lit and thought of his father's notches. His trade continued to change around him. Cheaper cloth from the West Riding, the new draperies brought by refugees from the Low Countries, and the growing power of the merchant clothiers pressed on the old guilds, and he saw combers he had trained as boys become hired hands to men who owned no combs of their own. He kept his own shop small and his own accounts clean. In the plague years that opened the seventeenth century, when the sickness closed streets in York and Leeds and chalked crosses appeared on doors, he took his household out to a cousin's barn near Tadcaster and stayed there until the bells stopped tolling. In appearance Percival was said to be tall and stooped, with grey eyes and a beard that had turned white by fifty. He did not drink to excess, and though he was not a man of learning he could read his psalter and sign his name with a strong hand. Neighbours described him as fair, slow to anger and unwilling to talk about anything he did not understand. He was a member of the guild, a churchwarden for some years, and a mildly respected voice at the meeting hall. He had no ledger of his own, but he was allowed to read the White Ledger's Yorkshire copy once a year, on the feast of St Thomas, and he handled it as if it were a sleeping animal. The old Guest at Towton he regarded as a story told by both families to avoid looking at their own failings, though he never said so in front of Quenild. Percival died in 1616, aged sixty-nine, of a fever that took him in the space of a week in the late autumn. Grace outlived him by only a year, dying in 1617, and their eldest daughter buried them both in the same churchyard. Quenild carried the White Ledger's business on for another decade. The ledgers preserve Percival not for a tally but for a line in the margin beside his father's name: that the house at Tadcaster had never once turned away a Proctor at its door. In the modern Slayerverse the Shackletons are remembered as a family of the second rank, whose strength lay in supply, in silence and in the quiet labour of ordinary people who held a hunting line together without ever drawing a blade themselves, and Percival is the best example of that tradition in his century.