Rosamund Proctor

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

When Rosamund Proctor was born at Skipton in 1623, her father was already a man with a reputation on the water and her mother was already a woman with a reputation in the record office, and neither of them was an ordinary parent. Her father, Ross Thorne, was a ferryman of the House of Thorne, one of those border-bred slayers who had drifted south from Northumberland and made a living on the rivers of the West Riding. Hunters knew him as The Dry Ledger, a nickname that came from his habit of coming home from the crossing with a tally so precise that no hunter could quarrel with it. Her mother, Katherine Proctor, was the daughter of a York clerk, trained from girlhood to keep records under pressure, and she was known among the Yorkist families as The Plague Clerk, for reasons the household preferred not to explain to children. The marriage joined a Thorne to a Proctor, and the children grew up half in one house and half in the other. Skipton in the 1620s was a small market town under the shadow of its castle, a place of sheep sales, oatcake, and narrow streets that ran down to the canal basin that did not yet exist. The Aire cut through the district and the ferry was a lifeline for carriers and drovers on the road between Craven and the clothing towns. Rosamund's earliest memories were of the smell of tar and wet rope, the creak of the flat boat on its chain, and her father standing at the sweep in all weathers. She had an elder brother, Henry Proctor, born in 1618, another brother Leonard Proctor, born in 1621, who would become a vampire slayer, and a younger sister Mercy Thorne, born in 1624 at Ripon. The children took different surnames as the family custom allowed, so that the parish clerk, who liked things simple, gave up on them. The household was disturbed by grief before it had time to settle. Ross Thorne died in 1628, when Rosamund was five, and the ferry passed to another man. Katherine Proctor was left with four children and a trade that paid only in reputation. She moved the family between Skipton and Ripon as work allowed, keeping the White Ledger entries in the evenings while she took in copying by day. She died in 1636, when Rosamund was thirteen, and it was Rosamund, the middle girl, who stood up at the graveside and did not cry. Someone had to see to the younger ones. Henry was eighteen and restless, Leonard fifteen and already drawn toward his mother's other work, and Mercy only twelve. From that year Rosamund kept the household in the way a good housekeeper does, by knowing where everything was and who needed feeding. That is the trade she took up. She went into service at fourteen in a gentleman's household on one of the coaching roads out of Skipton, and by twenty she was a housekeeper in her own right, in charge of linen, stores, servants and the household accounts. It was a demanding post. A house of that kind brewed its own beer, salted its own beef, baked its own bread, and supplied travellers who stopped at the gate with a meal and a bed. The housekeeper's day began before dawn with the keys at her waist and ended after the last candle was counted. She learned to detect a short measure from the sound of a scoop, and a lying servant from the way he set down a jug. The gentry she served were divided by the civil wars into Royalist and Parliamentarian, and there were mornings when both kinds sat at the same table and Rosamund carried the dishes between them. She married in 1645, in the year of Naseby, to Ivo Wilberforce, a tavern keeper born in 1618. The match surprised her family, because Ivo was a large, easy-going man who preferred to laugh at trouble, and Rosamund was a small, exact woman who preferred to prevent it. But it worked. He kept a tavern on the road, with a yard for horses, a taproom low and smoky enough to hold a hundred stories, and a cellar that she reorganised in the first month. The tavern became the family's ear. Travellers talked, and drink loosened the talk, and Rosamund, who now poured beer as she had once poured broth, found that a Proctor who listened could learn a great deal. She would sit up late with the day's reckoning, and when a story sounded like something the ledger would want, she noted it in a small hand on the back of a tally sheet and sent it by carrier to her brother Leonard. Their son Ross Proctor was born in 1646, the year after the wedding, and named for the grandfather he would never meet. The name Proctor came to him through his mother rather than his father, in the way the family so often arranged such things, and Ivo, being easy-going, made no objection. The boy grew up in the taproom and the stable yard, learned to read from the account book, and by his teens showed the signs that Leonard had shown at the same age. He became a vampire slayer, and in his time a considerable one, dying in 1713 after a long career. Rosamund did not speak of it to him in the beginning. She only let him see the ledger, as her own mother had done, and watched to see what he would do with it. The civil wars had not ended when she married, and the years that followed were nervous ones. The tavern quartered soldiers, then lost them, then quartered others. Taxes fell heavily on innkeepers, and Ivo's easy ways nearly cost them the lease more than once. It was Rosamund who worked out the excise, negotiated with the landlord, and held the accounts against the day when a judge might ask for them. In the great plague year of 1665 she closed the yard and turned away carriers from the infected south, an act that lost them trade and probably saved their lives. Neighbours who had once grumbled at her strictness came to the door afterwards with eggs and apologies. The Proctors of Yorkshire kept up their long, civil contest with the Faulkners of Lancashire, and Rosamund, in her own way, played a part in it. She took a professional interest in the other side's methods, having heard from travellers that the Faulkner women kept accounts as carefully as any Proctor. She admired that, and said so, and it was noted as a Proctor eccentricity. But she would not concede the Guest, the vampire lost at Towton, and she told her son that whoever had let it slip, it had not been one of theirs. She died in 1674, aged fifty-one, of childbed, a late and unlooked-for lying-in that left the household shaken and her husband silent. Ivo Wilberforce outlived her by nine years and died in 1683 without ever quite managing the cellar as she had. Her son Ross carried her ledger notes into the White Ledger, and the family long remembered her as the woman who had kept the keys and the count. In the wider Slayerverse she is a small but sure figure: a housekeeper who understood that a tally is only as good as the hands that keep it, and who kept it well.