Roland Kershaw Proctor wrote a beautiful hand, and it is the first thing anyone says of him. Born in York in 1667, he became a clerk as his father had before him, and he spent forty years of a short life copying, checking and filing in rooms near the Minster, where the ink froze in January and the tallow candles guttered in the draughts from the river. He belonged to the House of Proctor and to the White Ledger by descent from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and although he never took up a stake, the family's most careful book owes a great deal to his pen.
His father, also named Roland Proctor, was a clerk in the service of a York attorney and a vampire slayer whom the ledger knows as The Quiet Bell. The alias came from a habit of his hunting: he was said to give a vampire the same warning a sexton gave the parish, a single low stroke, before the end. His mother, Clemence Kershaw, was a dairywoman from the country round York, a woman who rose at four to the milking and who carried into the town a farmer's frankness about weather, prices and other people's business. Roland was their second child. His sister Avice Proctor, born in 1664, was three years older, and it was Avice who taught him to read from a hornbook propped against the butter churn.
York in the 1660s and 1670s was a cathedral city that had lost some of its old importance without quite knowing it. The Council of the North had been abolished in 1641 and never restored, and the great families had drifted to London, but the city remained the ecclesiastical and legal capital of the north, with the Minster, the assize courts at the Castle, the Merchant Adventurers' hall and a flourishing trade in leather, coal, corn and lead. Roland's earliest memories were of church bells, of river floods creeping into the cellars of Ouse Bridge, and of the smell of the shambles on Thursday mornings. He grew up in a narrow house in a lane off Micklegate, and his father, who walked to work along the city walls every morning with a satchel of pens over his shoulder, often took the boy on Sundays to look at the ledgers of old York, the guild books and the court rolls.
He was schooled at a grammar school attached to the Minster, where he learned Latin, arithmetic and the elegant italic hand that later made him valuable. He was a thin, bespectacled boy with a shock of dark hair that would not lie flat, given to laughing at his own mistakes, and the schoolmaster wrote in a report that Master Proctor would make an excellent clerk provided somebody could prevent him from reading the documents rather than copying them. This was the truth. Roland loved paper for what it said, and to him a deed or a will was a small drama. He was apprenticed at fourteen to a scrivener in Stonegate, and by twenty he was earning a clerk's wage in the same trade as his father.
His mother died in 1682, when Roland was fifteen, and the household changed. Clemence Kershaw's death, from a lingering complaint the physician could only call decline, left Avice, then eighteen, in charge of the house, and left Roland's father, who could not bear the empty kitchen, increasingly out at night. It was in those years that Roland discovered what his father did. He was sixteen when he followed him one evening down to the riverbank below the castle, curious and frightened, and watched him stand motionless in the fog for an hour, then move with an efficient, unhurried quietness that ended with a small sound and a stake. His father turned, saw him, and merely said that the ledger needed a new clerk when the time came. Roland understood that he was being offered something, and that he was being told, kindly, that it was not the calling but the book.
He never received the calling and never sought it. The White Ledger of the Proctors had been kept in York since 1455, and by the 1680s its pages were multiplying with entries from cousins in Pennsylvania, Virginia and the western dales. Somebody had to copy them, reconcile the numbers, and sift the boasts from the facts. That somebody became Roland. His father supplied the tallies, and Roland, in the evenings after his day's work at the scrivener's, entered them in the White Ledger in a clear, black, unornamented hand. He was meticulous to a degree that irritated some of his cousins, refusing to enter a tally he could not source, and he built a reputation for fairness that reached, remarkably, even to the Faulkner side. A Lancashire cousin once wrote to him that the Yorkshire ledger had a clerk who would not lie even for his own side, and that this was the rarest thing in either book.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 came to York in December, when the Earl of Danby's supporters seized the city for the Prince of Orange. Roland was twenty-one. He remembered the tension in the streets, the sudden white and orange ribbons, the ringing of the Minster bells and his father, who had no politics, shrugging and saying that vampires did not care who was king. For Roland, the change of monarch meant new oaths to be sworn and new forms to be copied, and he copied them. He was a moderate man and a Protestant by habit rather than zeal, and he thought the whole business of thrones was best watched from a writing-desk.
He never married. Family opinion holds that he came close once, to a draper's daughter in Coney Street, and that the arrangement collapsed when her father learned that the clerk spent his nights over a book that was not a Bible and could not be shown to anyone. The truth is probably simpler. Roland was a private man with a demanding secret, his sister kept house for him with fierce competence, and he found a satisfaction in his work that was not easily traded. He had no children, and his ledger entries, several thousand of them across his lifetime, are the only descendants he left. He was fond of his cousins and wrote them long, dry, funny letters in which he corrected their arithmetic.
The Faulkner rivalry touched him lightly and with humour. He believed that the Guest had escaped from Towton, and that the Faulkners had been careless, but he thought it absurd to scrap over it two centuries later. In his own hand he once added a note at the foot of a page: "Red Ledger tally disputed, but courteously." He was buried in 1711 at the age of forty-four, having died of a wasting illness that took him four years after his father's death in 1707 had left him the sole keeper of the White Ledger's Yorkshire copy. The Slayerverse remembers Roland Kershaw Proctor as the clerk who never drew a stake but whose precise, honest pen made the Proctor tallies believable, which, in a contest of ledgers, was worth more than a stake.
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