Renee Foster Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Grey Latch. Craft: Ledger Recall.

Renee Foster Proctor was born in 1970 at Birmingham, Alabama, and is living today in Birmingham, where she works as a seamstress and, since 1987, as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Grey Latch, a name for the small plain catch that holds a door shut without anyone noticing it, and it classes her as a Spy, a hunter who works by watching, listening and keeping a cover, and who would sooner know where a creature sleeps than meet it in the street. Her craft is Ledger Recall, the art of carrying the whole of the White Ledger in the head so that no page of it need ever be written down, carried or burned, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was called in 1987, after a fire that burned a whole lane and left one door standing. She is the elder daughter of the electrician George Foster and of the nurse Virginia Carter, and the granddaughter of the slayer Wilma Proctor, The Rough Shuttle. In 1988 she married the postal clerk Michael Collins, and they raised two children, Gary Collins Proctor and Erin Proctor Collins, both slayers. Her sister Nicole Proctor was not called. The lane was called Cobb Street, and she can still draw it. It ran for two hundred yards along the side of a hill in the mill district north of the city, a row of narrow frame houses with tin roofs and porches, built for iron workers in the nineties of the last century and let, by 1987, to their grandchildren. She knew it because her grandmother Wilma, in whose house on the hill she had spent the whole of that summer, had a dozen customers there, and because Renee, at seventeen, was the girl who carried the finished garments down in a flat basket. She had delivered a green wedding dress to number nine on the Wednesday. On the Saturday night, in the third week of August, at about two o'clock, the whole of the lane burned. It burned oddly. She was woken by the sirens and went out on to her grandmother's porch, and from the hill she saw it, a ribbon of orange between two dark ends, and by dawn it was a line of black stumps and wet ash with the fire engines standing at either end of it. Nobody had died. Every household in the lane, eleven families, had been got out, by a man in a long coat, the neighbours said, whom no one had known, and who had gone from door to door in the smoke, knocking, until the last child was out. The families wept and thanked him. Renee, who had climbed down the hill in her nightgown and was standing in the street with a flat basket, which she had picked up from habit, noticed two things. One was that the fire had begun at both ends of the lane and moved inward. The other was that one door, the door of number nine, the house of the green dress, stood upright in the middle of the ash with the frame gone to nothing round it, and that on it, at the height of a man's hand, there was a mark that she had seen only once before, in the margin of a page in her grandmother's sewing room. She had been shown that page two years earlier. Wilma, who had been a vampire slayer for forty-four years and believed in telling children what they would need to know, had taken her granddaughter into the sewing room one evening and opened a grey cloth book on the cutting table. It was a copy of the White Ledger's Alabama pages, written in Wilma's own hand over many years. She told her to read it, and the girl read it, and was told to read it again, and then Wilma closed it and asked what had been on the sixth page. Renee said. She was sent back to it the next night, and the next. By Christmas she could give the Alabama pages in order, with the dates. It was not a trick. It was only that she had a mind, as her grandmother observed with some alarm, that held things as a drawer holds spoons. On the morning after the fire she walked into number nine, through a door that had no wall on either side of it, and read the ash. She read it as she had read the Ledger, once, and in order, and she found that the door had been marked by someone who was looking for her. It was not a fire to destroy a lane. It was a fire to make a point, and the point was that the Ledger's copy, which a cousin in number fourteen had kept in a biscuit tin under the floor, was now paper ash, and that someone had wished it so. The cousin had been out for the night. The tin was gone. And in a girl's head, two streets away, the whole of the Alabama pages remained. She told her grandmother that afternoon, in the sewing room, in a level voice, what she had seen. Wilma sat down at the machine, put her hands in her lap and said that she had hoped for a few years longer. She never carried a Ledger again, and she never allowed anyone else to carry hers. That was the whole of her craft, and she named it herself. A book, she told her grandmother that autumn, can be burned, and a book can be stolen, and a book can be read over a shoulder in a bus. A person who has learned it cannot be burned, though she can, of course, be killed, and a hunter who knows what the Ledger says without having it about her is, she said, a person who can walk through any door and be taken for a seamstress. She was a Spy, by temperament and by choice. She learned to keep a cover as a woman keeps a pin in her mouth, without noticing. She learned to listen at a fitting, where a customer will tell a woman on her knees with a mouthful of pins everything that she would not tell her priest. The cousins in the Birmingham chapter, who were unsure what to make of a seventeen-year-old who could recite a century of pages without a note, took to calling her The Grey Latch, because she was the small thing that held the door. She married the postal clerk Michael Collins in 1988, in the spring, at her parents' church on the hill, when she was eighteen and he was twenty-four. He was a tall, easy, fair-haired man who had delivered the mail to her grandmother's street for two years and had, on one occasion, stopped on the porch to ask whether the lady of the house would like to hear a joke about the Postmaster General. She said that she would hear it at the wedding, and he proposed on the spot. Michael was never a hunter, and was told before the ring was bought. He heard her out, with the hat in his hands, and said that it explained the way that she knew which house a letter was for before she looked at the address. He went on sorting mail for thirty-one years in the main post office on Morris Avenue, a job that suited a Ledger family, since a postal clerk knows every address in a city, and he kept her informed, in the discreet way of the profession, of moves, of forwarding cards, and of the people who had begun to collect no mail at all. Gary Collins Proctor was born in 1991 and Erin Proctor Collins in 1992, and both were entered in the Ledger under the old women's custom, one as a Proctor and one with the Proctor in the middle, because Renee, who had a great respect for tidy records, held that no two arrangements need be alike. She taught them as she had been taught, without ever calling it teaching. At supper she would say the name of a street and ask them what had happened on it. At eleven Erin could name the houses of an entire district. At twelve Gary could say who had been at the door on a certain day and what they had worn. Both were called in their turn, and she did not argue. Her grandmother died in the autumn of 1998 in the sewing room, with her pins on the arm of the chair, and Renee, who was twenty-eight and had been pinning a hem in the next room, took over the machine. She sews in a front room on a street of old brick houses, with a bell on the door, a long counter, a rack of garments in tissue paper and a three-way mirror. In the week of the attacks of September 2001 she worked through the weekend, taking in black dresses for funerals that were being held for people she did not know. In 2009 her father died in Jackson, of a long illness, and she was in the doorway of the room, having come in from the road, with a flat basket on the passenger seat. Her mother outlived him by seven years, and her sister Nicole, who is a nurse, looked after her at the end. She is fifty-six, a thin, neat, grey-eyed woman with a measuring tape around her neck, a pincushion on her wrist and a habit of looking at a customer's hem before she looks at her face. In the pandemic years she sewed masks at the counter, a thousand of them, in pairs, and gave them to the post office. She still knows every page of the White Ledger that her grandmother ever copied for her, and a good many pages that no one has yet written down. She says that this is not remarkable, and that anyone who had stood in the ash at Cobb Street would have done the same. Renee Foster Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Grey Latch, the seamstress who carried the White Ledger in her head so that no fire could take it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Spies of the Proctor line, the hunters who were never seen to hunt, and who proved that a good memory, a pocketful of pins and a plain face at a fitting are the best-guarded door in the dark.