Thomasin Mauleverer

Spouse of Piers Armitage, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Thomasin Mauleverer was born in 1530 at Ripon, in Yorkshire, and spent sixty-four years as a seamstress, a wife and, for the greater part of her adult life, the quiet keeper of a secret that was not hers by birth. She married into the Proctor line, a slayer family of the Wetherby and Tadcaster country who kept the White Ledger, and she never carried a stake or a pistol. What she carried was a work-basket, and the history of her marriage shows how much of the Slayerverse was held together by women who sat at a window with a needle and noticed things. Ripon in her childhood was a cathedral-less minster town on the Skell, with a market place wide enough to hold a fair and a custom, older than anyone could say, by which a horn was blown every evening at the corners of the square to tell the town that it was watched through the night. Thomasin grew up under that horn. Her people were small tradesmen of no great note, the Mauleverers of the lower town, a name borne by richer gentlemen elsewhere in the county but by her own family only as a faint and unprofitable cousinship that her father liked to mention and her mother liked to ignore. She was one of a houseful of children and learned early that a girl with quick fingers need never be idle or hungry. At eight she was hemming shirts for a draper in Kirkgate. At twelve she could cut a sleeve from a paper pattern and set it so that it hung true, and at sixteen she was taking commissions from the wives of the market-town gentry, who found her prices small and her stitching almost impossible to fault. The seamstress's trade, in a town like Ripon, was a trade of confidences. Women came to be fitted and talked while pins were in her mouth. She heard about quarrels over wills, a husband who stayed out too late, an illness in a back bedroom, and she held it all with the discretion of a confessor. It was that habit, rather than any romance, that brought her into the notice of the Proctors. A drover of the family's acquaintance, Piers Armitage, who moved cattle from the dales to the markets of the south and was known to every innkeeper between Richmond and Doncaster, had a coat that needed mending after a hard season, and he was sent to Thomasin by a mutual friend. He came back for the coat and stayed to sit on the bench in her mother's yard. He was a lean, weathered, soft-voiced man some years her elder, and he said very little, which she found restful. They were married in 1555. The religious upheaval under the Tudor crown was then at its height: the church services had changed and were about to change again, and every bride in the county was wondering whether the priest who married her would still be in his place by Michaelmas. Thomasin was married by a priest who stayed in his place, and she went to live with Piers in a small house near the drovers' road at the edge of Wetherby, with a lean-to that served as her workroom and a window that looked out upon the stone bridge. She did not yet know that her husband was a vampire slayer. She knew that he was often away, that he came home with road dust and the smell of woodsmoke, and that he had a habit of checking the latch twice at dusk and of sleeping with his boots by the bed. She assumed these were the habits of his trade. She learned the truth in the fourth year of the marriage, and she learned it by sewing. Piers came in one November night with his sleeve torn open from shoulder to elbow and a long shallow wound under it that had not bled as it should. Thomasin cleaned and stitched the cloth and then, without being asked, the arm, in the same small even stitch she used on a linen shirt. When she had finished she looked at him and said that the thing that did this had not been a dog, and that she would like to be told what it was. He told her. He told her about the Proctors, about the White Ledger kept in a case in the family's keeping, about Towton and the Guest, and about the long, courteous, unresolved quarrel with the Faulkners of Lancashire over who had let it pass. She listened with a face that gave nothing away. At the end she said only that she supposed she had better learn to make a coat that would turn a claw, and from that night she did. It was a real craft and a useful one. A seamstress who understood the work could sew a pocket into the lining of a drover's coat that would hold a stake without printing through the cloth, make a high collar that protected the neck without looking like armour, and stitch a strip of hawthorn-wood splints into a cuff so that an arm raised in defence was not so easily broken. She never wrote any of it in the White Ledger, being no clerk, but she had Piers show her where the family's entries were, and she learned to read his tally upside down across the table. The family came to call on her quietly when a coat needed work. Slayers from Tadcaster and Knaresborough rode in with a bundle under the saddle and rode out again with their garments mended, their seams reinforced, and a short and shrewd opinion on their condition. She never charged them the full price and never allowed them to leave without a meal. Her own life was lived mostly at that window. She had no children, a sorrow she carried without complaint and spoke of seldom, and she turned the house over to her work and to her husband's wants. There were cousins' children underfoot at Christmas and neighbours' infants to be handed to her at the churching, and she had a way of holding other people's babies that made mothers trust her. The girls of the neighbourhood were taught to sew in the lean-to, and she was brisk with them and never unkind. If she was lonely when Piers was away on the road, she kept it to herself and filled the hours with work, and the quality of the work was famous in three parishes. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 came close. Rebel companies moved through the neighbourhood and then, in the following winter, the queen's soldiers followed them, and a good many families found themselves caught between loyalties they had never chosen. Thomasin hid Piers's pack in a chest under a heap of unfinished petticoats and told a sergeant at her door, with perfect composure, that she was a seamstress and knew nothing of politics. He took her at her word. Piers, who had been moving cattle through the disturbed country, came home gaunt that Christmas and found the house untouched and the table laid. In the ledger of the family's quiet debts, that winter is written in her favour. Piers died in 1581. He had been failing slowly, as drovers do who have walked the length of England in all weathers, and Thomasin nursed him through the last season. She was fifty-one when she was left, and she did not remarry. She kept the house, sewed for the town and for the slayers, and sat in the lean-to window through the long evenings. In the summer of 1588, when the news ran north that a great fleet had been seen off the coast and the beacons were lit on the hills one after another, she stood at her door with the neighbours and watched the fires march across the moor. A boy at her elbow asked if the world was ending. She told him that it was more likely to need mending, and went in to finish a hem. She died in 1594 from a fall from a horse. She had learned late in life to ride, to visit a friend across the moor, and had never been easy in the saddle. The mare stumbled on a stony lane near Collingham, and she was found some time later by a passing carter. She was sixty-four. The slayers of the family came to the burial in the church at Wetherby in their plain best coats, every seam of which had passed through her hands at some time, and not one of them had a word of complaint about the quality of the stitching. Thomasin Mauleverer is remembered in the Proctor family as the woman who sewed the slayers whole, a seamstress of Ripon who joined a slayer family by marriage and who turned out, in the end, to be its most dependable armourer. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet work that makes the loud work possible: the mending, the lining, the watchful needle at the window, and the discipline of holding every secret you are given.