Wilfred Proctor

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

Wilfred Proctor was a farrier, born in 1538 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, and he spent sixty-five years shoeing the horses of the Great North Road. He was the youngest of the three children of Nicholas Proctor, a carrier whom the slayers of the family called "The Slow Warden", and Elspeth Thorne, the horse-dealer known as "The Red Warden", and he grew up among the Proctors who kept the White Ledger. He never married, and he never took the slayer's calling, though he stood closer to the work than most men who did. If the Proctors of Wetherby had a smithy to which every slayer came sooner or later, it was Wilfred's, and a good many of the family's stakes, hooks and blades were forged there in the dark of the night. His childhood was loud and sooty and he remembered it fondly. The house in Wetherby stood behind the market place, with a long cobbled yard and a row of stalls, and next to the yard was the smithy of a farrier named in the parish book only as Master Hollins, an enormous man with a leather apron, scarred forearms and a temper that never reached his hands. His brother Ninian Proctor, eight years his senior, was a breaker of horses and tended to be at the yard's far end with a colt. His sister Grizel Proctor, four years older, was off with the midwife. Wilfred, left to himself, wandered next door at the age of six and stayed. Hollins did not drive him away. The boy worked the bellows, swept the floor, held the lamp over a hoof, and learned the names of all the tools. By nine he was trimming a hoof under supervision. By fourteen he could fit a shoe cold or hot, and by sixteen he had forged his first set for a plough-horse that was reckoned to be a good job. He was a large, even-tempered young man with broad hands and a slow, deliberate way of talking, and he had the farrier's gift of calm. A frightened horse can kill a man who shows his own fear, and Wilfred never showed it. He would stand at the animal's shoulder with a hand on its flank and talk about nothing at all, the weather, the price of oats, until the trembling stopped. He learned a good deal about horses and about people from this, and what he learned about people was that most of them are afraid of something and a few are afraid of nothing at all, and that the second kind are dangerous. In the years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, when everybody in the parish seemed afraid of the next sermon, he kept his own counsel and shoed whatever horses were brought to him. He knew about the family business from the age of ten, since a boy raised in that household could not help it, and he made a quiet and entirely deliberate decision about it. He would not be a slayer. When his brother was called in 1556, he stood in the yard and watched Ninian take the hawthorn stakes from their mother, and he understood that the work would take his brother's nights and, in time, very likely his life. He did not argue. He said to Ninian that he would keep the iron. It was meant half as a joke. It turned out to be exactly right. From that year the family's smith-work was done by Wilfred, and done well. He forged the points for the stakes, bound in hawthorn, so that a tip would not split. He made the hooks that hold open a cellar hatch from outside, and the chain-and-bar shackles that a slayer could throw over a doorway. He made, with a good deal of patient experiment, a hinged cuff of iron lined with soft leather that could be closed around a wrist in a single motion. None of these things is in any inventory of wonders, and all of them were used. He was practical to his bones, and he disliked the romantic accounts of the work that cousins sometimes brought him. A vampire, to Wilfred's mind, was a problem of iron, wood and timing, and the heroes of the story were the people who had the right tool to hand. He also had firm opinions about the long dispute with the Faulkners of Lancashire over Towton and the Guest. He thought it was a waste of good ink. When a Faulkner rider came through the town with a lame horse, in the third year of Elizabeth's reign or thereabouts, Wilfred shod the animal without charge and without a question and watched the man ride away north. He was not sentimental about it. He said that the iron did not know which rose the horse had been bred under. The rising of the northern earls, in 1569 and 1570, was a crowded and frightening season for a farrier, since armed men on both sides were in constant need of shoes and had a poor record of payment. Wilfred worked his forge round the clock for a month. He shod the horses of those who passed through, hid the best tools in the chimney, and managed through some mixture of civility and stubbornness to avoid being impressed by either party. He took no side. In the following spring, when the queen's officers came through to count the damage, he was found at his anvil with a blister on every finger and was recorded in the muster as a useful man. It was the only time his name was written by a government clerk. His mother, Elspeth, died in 1572. His father had been dead seventeen years, and his brother Ninian was now the senior slayer of the household. When Ninian was killed in 1587 in an ambush on a lonely road, it was Wilfred who went out with the cart to bring him home and who made the iron fittings for the coffin. He was forty-nine. He went on working. It was the only thing he knew how to do. He took his brother's dogs, the old grey one among them, into his own yard and fed them every morning for the rest of their lives. He lived with his sister Grizel for a time in the house behind the market, and, after she was gone, alone. He never married, though a miller's daughter at Collingham was understood to be fond of him for some years and he was understood to be fond of her, and for reasons neither ever stated the matter did not come to a head. In the summer of 1588, when the beacons were lit along the ridge above the Wharfe, he took the lad from the forge up to the hilltop, set him on a wall to watch the string of fires run north, and told him that every beacon on that line had been built by a man with a hammer. He was sixty-four when his sister died in an accident on the fells in 1600. He closed the forge that day and for the first time in his life kept it shut for a week. He died in 1603 of a fever that took half of the street that autumn. He had taken it in the damp days of September, working at an urgent job for a carrier whose horse had cast a shoe on the bridge, and he refused to lie down until the job was done. He was sixty-five. At his funeral the horses were brought into the churchyard, a custom his neighbours later said they had never seen before or since, and the apprentice stood at the head of the grave in the old man's leather apron. The forge went on, under another name, for another century. The iron hooks he made are said to have been in use in York as late as the siege of 1644. Wilfred Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the smith of the slayer family, the Wetherby farrier who forged the tools and refused the calling, and who was nonetheless, on every night that mattered, in the room. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craft behind the courage: the patient hand at the anvil, the good iron, the door that shuts when it is meant to shut, and the willingness to be useful without being famous.