Sibyl Proctor

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

Sibyl Proctor spent her working life with a mouthful of pins, and it was said in Richmond that she could tell a woman's business from the way her bodice fitted. Born in 1617 in the Yorkshire market town of Richmond, the younger daughter of Alastair Thorne and Christiana Proctor, she became a dressmaker of some repute and, without ever taking up a stake, one of the most useful members of the White Ledger's household network. She lived sixty-eight years, most of them within a few streets of the place she was born. Her father Alastair Thorne, born in 1586, was a yeoman of the sort that made up the backbone of the Swaledale country, holding his land on a long lease and paying his dues with a farmer's grumbling regularity. Her mother Christiana Proctor, born in 1592, was a tavern keeper's daughter, brought up among tankards and travellers, and her name explains why the daughters of the household went by the Proctor side in the family's private reckoning, though the surname on the christening register was that of their father. By family custom the name often passed through daughters, and Sibyl carried the Proctor name in the ledgers even where the parish clerk wrote Thorne. Her elder sister, Christiana Thorne, born a year earlier in 1616, would become the vampire slayer known as the Silent Ledger, and much of Sibyl's life can be understood as a long conversation with her. The two girls could hardly have been less alike. Christiana was grave and watchful; Sibyl was warm, talkative and quick to laugh, with a habit of finishing other people's sentences and a talent for mimicry that once reduced a churchwarden to tears in the middle of a sermon. She hated the smell of the farm and loved the smell of cloth. At eleven she was apprenticed, or as good as, to a Richmond mantua-maker who had come north from York with a chest of patterns, and there she learned to cut and pin and stitch, to draw a bodice from a paper template and to sew a seam that would not show. By her early twenties she had a room of her own above a saddler's yard and a reputation for making a plain girl look composed and a rich one look plain. Dressmaking in those decades was not the industry it later became. Cloth came from the loom in narrow lengths and was dear; a good gown might be turned twice and handed down, and a dressmaker was as much a repairer as a maker. Sibyl worked in worsted and linsey-woolsey for the farmers' wives, in fustian and lawn for the tradesmen's daughters, and once a year, for the gentry of the district, in silk that arrived in oiled paper and was handled like a sacrament. She kept a box of tailor's chalk, a lead pencil, a set of steel needles sorted by size, and a big pair of shears she called the Bishop. Customers came at all hours, and gossip came with them. That gossip was how she came to serve the White Ledger. Christiana's calling, in 1644, had turned the household into something like a small intelligence service, and Sibyl, who was never called herself, learned quite early what her place would be. A dressmaker enters every house in the town, is admitted without question to the private rooms, sees the marks on a neck or the bandage on a wrist when she measures for a sleeve, and can ask what she likes under cover of pins. Sibyl asked. If a girl was pale beyond reason, or a gentleman's wife had stopped coming to church, or a lace collar was suddenly wanted to cover a throat, Sibyl noticed, and by the end of the week a slip of paper would have found its way to her sister's shop, hidden in a hem, a buttonhole or the lining of a cuff. The family later called this the seamstress post, and it worked for forty years without once being discovered. She was witty about her role. When her sister told her that a certain merchant's daughter had been found dead in her bed with two neat marks on her wrist, Sibyl said, so the story goes, that she had known that girl was anaemic when she made her wedding gown. But the grief was real, and it was Sibyl who sat up with bereaved families and helped with the mourning clothes, and it was Sibyl who made the long black gown in which Christiana was eventually buried. She never married. There were offers, at least three, one from a wool-stapler of Darlington, but Sibyl, who was not shy, said she had enough to do stitching for other women's weddings without adding one of her own. Whether there was a private reason, a suitor who never came back from the war, a wish to stay near her sister, or simply the preference of a woman who liked her independence, the family never recorded. She had no children, though she had many nieces and nephews by courtesy: the children of Richmond who came to her workshop for scraps of ribbon and, in exchange, sat on the floor and sorted her buttons. The civil wars gave her steady work and steady danger. Officers of both armies needed coats mended and sashes made, and she took commissions from Cavalier and Roundhead alike, listening more than she spoke. In 1665, when the great plague year reached the north, she made shrouds for the dead and gowns for the survivors, working by candlelight with a cloth soaked in vinegar over her nose, and she refused to close her shop. The parish books have a note that she was among those who continued to serve when others fled. Her health failed slowly in her sixties. A wasting illness, never named by the doctor and unhelped by the physic he prescribed, took the flesh from her hands and the colour from her face, and she stopped sewing altogether in the spring of 1685. Christiana, then sixty-nine, sat with her through the summer and brought her the wares of the shop, sweets, a length of blue ribbon, a small book of hymns. She died in 1685, at the age of sixty-eight, in the room above the saddler's yard, with her sister beside the bed. The White Ledger records Sibyl Proctor without a tally, because she never hunted, but in the margin beside the entry someone later wrote a small drawing of a needle. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the dressmaker who wove the family's eyes into every parlour in Richmond, proof that the war against vampires was waged as much with thread and tact as with hawthorn and iron.