Rohese Stansfield learned to skim cream before she learned to read, and she never entirely stopped believing that the first skill was the more useful. She was born in Leeds in 1561, in the reign of Elizabeth, in a town that had not yet become the cloth capital it would be, but was on its way. Briggate ran down to the bridge over the Aire like a spine, lined with burgage plots where every householder had a tenter frame in the back and a loom in the front, and twice a week the clothiers set out their undyed broadcloths on trestles for the merchants to feel and haggle over. The town smelled of wet wool, woad, urine and coal smoke, and its river ran a different colour on different days depending on which dyer had been busy upstream. Rohese, whose parents left no names in the family record and whose people were simply country folk of the Aire valley, grew up on the edge of all this, in a cottage with a cow-house on the road to Headingley.
The family kept two cows and sold what the household did not need, and from the age of six she was set to the dairy. She rose before light, carried the pails from the field, strained the milk through a linen cloth, set it in wide shallow pans to raise the cream, and churned butter in a barrel that was taller than she was. Cheese was made twice a week, pressed under stones and turned daily, and by ten she could tell from the smell whether a batch would ripen sweet or sour. A dairywoman in that period held a real craft, more skilled than most men allowed, and one that depended on cleanliness, timing and a sharp eye for the beasts. She was a strong girl, square-shouldered, with big red hands and a dry laugh, and when the pails were full she carried two at a time on a yoke as though they were made of paper.
Leeds in her girlhood was busy and often unhealthy. There were the market days, when farmers drove flocks along Briggate, and the fairs when tumblers and pedlars pitched their stalls beside the parish church of St Peter. There were the sermons, which grew longer and more Protestant as the years passed, and the visits of the constable, who fined the unruly and whipped the vagrant. In bad winters the Aire froze at the edges and the poor burned whatever they could find. Rohese saw all this without much commentary. She worked, she went to church, and she saved the coins she earned from selling butter at the market in a small leather purse she kept under her shift.
In her middle teens she went to work at a dairy farm near York, hired for the year at a fair and sent north with a bundle and a letter, and it was there, at a hiring fair, that she met Kit Proctor. He was a year older, tall and cheerful and slow to speak, in service with a farmer at Clifton, and he was working out how to say something to her while she was working out how not to look at him. Neither of them was rich; neither had any family land to speak of. But he had a name, and she had a trade, and by the standards of the time that was a good beginning. They were married in 1577, at St Olave's in York, when she was sixteen. She wore her best kirtle, a clean apron and a garland of what flowers could be got in early spring, and carried a wedding cheese she had made herself.
Their first farm at Heworth was a hard place. The hall had a beaten earth floor, the cheese room leaked in a wet season, and the rent was high. Rohese ran the dairy with her usual efficiency, but she also managed the household, kept the hens, cared for the pigs, brewed small beer and baked the bread, and did it all while pregnant. Their daughter Agatha Proctor was born in 1579, two years after the wedding. Their son Guy Proctor followed in 1583. Between the births she took in extra milk from neighbours, made cheeses for the York market, and turned a modest enterprise into a real business. By the mid-1580s the Proctor cheeses were sold at the Thursday market and a merchant on Coney Street had begun asking for them by name.
She married into a family with a secret, and she was not long in finding it out. Kit's brother Godfrey, the smith, was a slayer, and Kit's late mother had been one before him; the Proctors of York were, in some fashion, keepers of a ledger of dead things. Rohese took it in stride. She was a practical woman from a practical trade, and she treated the discovery the way she treated a sour batch of milk: it was a fact of life, and it needed dealing with. When Godfrey came to the farm in the Armada summer, with beacons lit along the coast and the whole county on edge, she fed him, mended his coat and scrubbed the bloodstains from the barn floor with sand and lye. She never asked how many, and never wished to be told.
She was not a woman to leave her children in ignorance, though. She taught Agatha and Guy to bar the door at dusk, to keep salt on the sills, and to answer no knock after dark unless they knew the voice. She was firm about it and uncomplicated. Agatha, who had her mother's shoulders and her father's patience, took it as one more household duty; Guy, who was quieter, asked more questions and got shorter answers. Rohese's view was that knowledge was safer than ignorance, and that a child who knew what to be afraid of was a child who might grow up. It was the same view she had of milk.
Her contact with the wider feud between the two families was slight. She was not a Proctor by birth and did not pretend to care about Towton; she had heard of the Faulkners as a Lancashire outfit with an ill-tempered ledger and left it at that. When the family talked about the Guest, she poured the ale. But she noticed, as outsiders often do, how much the story mattered to the people who told it, and she came to respect a loyalty that could survive more than a century without a single decisive fact.
The hard winters of the early Stuart reigns wore her down. In the cold months of 1610 a cough took hold of her lungs and did not release them, and she died of it that winter, aged forty-nine, at the farm at Heworth. Kit buried her in the parish churchyard and stopped whistling. The Slayerverse does not include Rohese Stansfield among its hunters, but the family has long counted her among the ones who kept the household running while the slayers were away, and the cheese she made is still remembered in Proctor kitchens as the standard by which all others were judged.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
