Prudence Proctor

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

Prudence Proctor taught the children of Wetherby their letters for nearly fifty years, and in all that time she did not once let a pupil leave her kitchen without being able to read his own name. She was born in 1581 at Wetherby in Yorkshire, a daughter of the Proctor line and of a slayer family that kept its true business behind a wool-stapler's door, and she died in 1650 of an accident on the fells, at the age of sixty-nine, having outlived her brother, her nephews and most of the people who had learned from her. She never married. She is among the quietest figures in the White Ledger and among the most useful. Her father was Lancelot Proctor, born in 1548, a notary's clerk who was known in the family's own entries as The Cold Lantern, a vampire slayer who hunted in the hours after the writing-desk was shut. Her mother was Philippa Rishworth, born in 1553, a cloth-seller with a stall in the market place and a good head for sums. Prudence had one brother, Gervase Proctor, born in 1578, who was three years her elder and who became an apothecary in York. The two of them grew up in a stone house with a slate roof a short walk from the bridge over the Wharfe, where the smell of damp wool met the smell of ink and the lantern hung on a hook by the door. Prudence learned to read at her father's elbow before she was five. Lancelot had no sons to spare for such lessons, the elder being already bound for York, and he found that his daughter had the quickest eye in the house. She learned to copy a round hand, to sand a page, to keep a margin, to read a bond or a lease or a will upside-down across a desk, and she learned, a little later, that the thick book on the high shelf was not a book of accounts. The White Ledger was shown to her in her tenth year, with the plain warning that the entries about Towton were not to be repeated outside the house. The Guest, the vampire the family said had slipped through the lines in 1461 because a Lancastrian slayer let it by, was a figure from her father's stories long before she saw it written. She understood that somewhere in Lancashire there was a Red Ledger which said the opposite, and she grew up with the settled, faintly amused conviction that neither family would ever give the other the satisfaction of a final answer. She was never called to the work. Lancelot watched for it, as fathers in that family did, and saw only an even temper and a hard head, and so in the end he made her his reader instead of his heir. By her teens she was the person to whom he handed the long entries to be copied fair, and she could say from memory, if asked, which hand had written which line in the Wars of the Roses pages and why a certain year had a gap. When Lancelot died in 1611 she was thirty, and she was the one who sat up with the open ledger and finished the entry he had left half written. That was the year she began her school. It was not a grand affair. A dame-school in Yorkshire in the reign of James was a woman, a kitchen, a bench and a hornbook, and a fee of a penny or two a week. Prudence set hers up in the front room of the family house, with her mother's blessing, with a cleaned table and a row of stools borrowed from the church, and she taught the youngest children of the market traders, the carters and the smaller farmers to read the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer and then anything that came to hand. She taught girls as readily as boys, which was not universal, and she was strict about the formation of letters, believing that handwriting was a form of honesty. Pupils remembered her as a tall woman with ink on her cuffs, a quiet voice and a ruler she never used, because she had discovered that a pause was a harder punishment. Her mother Philippa lived on until 1619, and the two women ran the house between them: the cloth-selling downstairs, the school in the front, the ledger room above. Philippa's stall was open on market days, and Prudence kept the books for it on the other days, and between them they made a modest living in the hard years that ran from 1603 to 1625, the plague years and cold winters of the early Stuart reigns. In bad seasons the school shrank to five or six children, and Prudence took payment in eggs and kindling, and on one winter she is said to have kept the whole room warm for a month on a cartload of peat that a grateful carter had left at the door. The work for the slayers never stopped. Gervase wrote to her from York, and later his son Lambert did, and she kept the letters, cutting from them the passages that mattered and copying them into the White Ledger in the evenings. She was the family's Wetherby clerk, the person in the north-west of the county who knew who had come and gone, who had been taken ill, who had a cellar that nobody would go into. Pupils' parents told her things they would not tell the parson, and she wrote nothing down that could embarrass them. The village thought her a prim woman with a taste for history. A few households, those whose children had been taken in the night or whose old people had woken changed, thought her something more, and it was to those households that she sent the quiet word that a Proctor in York might be able to help. She was fond of the fells. On Sundays, when the weather allowed, she walked up beyond the last farms to a gritstone ridge where she could see the whole of the Wharfe valley, and there, her pupils later said, she read for an hour with her back to the wind. It was a habit she kept well into old age. In the years of the civil wars she watched from the ridge the movements of the armies, because the roads below were full of marching men, and she noted in her small clear hand which regiments passed and how long they took. When news came, in the summer of 1644, that York was besieged and then that it had surrendered, she did what she could for her brother and his family by letter and by the carrier, and received in return the news that she was to say nothing more of the siege that she did not have to. She was told of her brother's death in that same year, and of the deaths of her nephews and niece, and of her sister-in-law Judith Ripley, and she took in the news without a visible change. She wrote the entries herself. She kept the school open that winter, and the one after, and she taught the children of the village their letters on a table that was a little too large for the room now that fewer people came to it. She was, by then, the last of her generation in Wetherby, and she said so to the parson, who did not know what she meant. She died in 1650 in an accident on the fells, caught by a fall on a wet scar in autumn fog on the ridge she had walked for forty years. A shepherd found her in the morning with her book still in her bag. The funeral was the largest the village had seen in a decade, and the pupils she had taught came from three parishes to stand in the churchyard. Her ledger entries, the ones she had copied from York, were found afterwards in a locked chest, and went where the family sent them. Prudence Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the teacher who kept the ledger alive in the north when the city was shut and the hunters were dead, a woman who had never lifted a stake and never wanted to, and who made certain that the family's story would be read by people who could read. In the Slayerverse she stands for the patient work of literacy and memory: the schoolroom as an arsenal, the clear hand as a weapon, and the unglamorous conviction that a record kept faithfully is a form of courage.