Tiffany Wentworth was born in 1544 in the city of York, which in that decade was a city that had seen better days and was not sure it would see them again. The great days of the wool staple and the Merchant Adventurers were fading, the guilds were complaining of hard times, and the suppression of the monasteries had emptied the religious houses that had once employed half the town. Yet York remained the capital of the north in everything but name, with the Council of the North sitting in the old abbey of St Mary, the Minster rising above its close, and market days that drew farmers from thirty miles around. It was into this half-declining, still-formidable place that she was born, though the record says nothing of her parents, and the family later said that she seemed to have arrived from the countryside rather than the town.
That impression was probably right, because her work was in the dairy. York was ringed with small farms that supplied the city with milk, butter, cheese and curds, and a dairymaid there rose in the dark, walked out to the byre by lantern, milked into a wooden pail, skimmed the pans, worked the churn and carried the finished butter back to the markets in baskets on her head. It was heavy, cold, exact work, done in a lime-washed dairy where cleanliness was law, and Tiffany was good at it. She could tell by the smell of a cow's milk whether the beast had eaten wet clover, and she could make a butter so firm and yellow that the wives of the aldermen asked for it by name. By her late teens she was a compact, quick young woman with strong wrists and a low, dry sense of humour.
She met Theobald Proctor at the Leeds market, or possibly at York, since the family told the story both ways. He was a mason's apprentice, big and slow and good-humoured, working on the church of a village on the road to Leeds, and she was selling cheese from a basket. They quarrelled, the story went, about the weight of his mallet, which he had set down on her stall, and by the end of the market day he had bought a round of cheese he did not want. They married in 1563, when Tiffany was nineteen and Theobald twenty-one, and set up in rented rooms near the Minster close, where he found work with the masons repairing the great church.
Life in the close was orderly and noisy. The Minster's lodge rang all day with chisels, the bells struck the hours, and the cathedral officers, canons and vicars in their gowns, passed through the lanes in a self-important stream. Tiffany kept house in two rooms and a loft, bought her milk and eggs each morning from country women at the gate, and continued to make butter for a dealer in the Shambles who paid her a few pence a week. Her first daughter, Alianore Proctor, was born in 1564, and her second, Tiffany Proctor, in 1568. They carried the Proctor name, as the family custom demanded. The younger girl was named for her mother, a habit that puzzled neighbours and delighted the household.
She came into the Proctor family knowing almost nothing of its second life. The White Ledger, begun by Walter Proctor in 1455 in the Wars of the Roses to tally the vampires taken by the Yorkist side, was not something a husband confided at the wedding. But she was too sharp to remain ignorant. Within a year she had noticed that her husband's kin came to the door at odd hours, that they spoke in half-sentences, that Theobald cut small marks into the stonework of certain houses and would not explain them. She asked him straight out, in the third winter of the marriage, and he told her, because he was a man who found lying more tiring than truth. She sat quiet for a while, then asked what she could do. That was the entirety of her initiation.
What she could do turned out to be considerable. A dairymaid knew about milk, and milk was a matter of interest to certain hunters, since some creatures could not enter a house that kept a bowl of it at the threshold, or so the old family belief went. Whether the belief was sound or not, Tiffany used it as cover. She left milk at doorsteps for the Proctor cousins on their night rounds, ostensibly a charity to the poor, and used the visits to pass on what she had heard in the market and the dairy. She also kept the household's stores of salt and tallow, and she sewed pouches for the slayers' gear out of oiled leather. The vampire slayers of the Proctor kin came to regard her kitchen as a safe house, and they ate her bread and cheese with gratitude.
The religious upheaval of the age touched her lightly. She was twenty-five when the northern earls rose in 1569 and the roads of Yorkshire filled with soldiers, and she spent that autumn hiding her butter money in a loose stone of the hearth and refusing to say where her husband was. She kept her faith in the parish and her opinions in her apron. When the queen's men began hanging rebels, Tiffany kept her daughters at home and her mouth shut, and the household was not troubled.
Then, in 1579, Theobald died of a fever, aged thirty-seven, leaving her a widow of thirty-five with daughters of fifteen and eleven. She did not remarry. She went back to the dairy, worked as long as her back would let her, and eventually lived with her elder daughter. She saw the queen die and the Scottish king come south, and endured the plague years of the early Stuart reign, when the city shut its gates and burned tar in the streets. Tiffany Wentworth died in 1604 of a fever, aged sixty, twenty-five years after her husband, and was buried at York. Her daughter Tiffany Proctor survived her by seventeen years and Alianore by thirty.
The Proctor ledgers give her a single line: "she kept the milk and the counsel." In the memory of the family, and in the wider Slayerverse, she stands for the country women who married into the White Ledger and found that the work of a hidden war could be done with a churn, a pail and a very good memory.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
