Ada Menger lived seventy years, from 1868 to 1938, and for most of them she was a milliner in San Antonio, Texas, a woman who could make a hat out of straw, felt, wire, silk and a bad mood and who carried the White Ledger's papers in the hatboxes that nobody ever thought to open. She was born in 1868 in Castroville, Texas, the little Alsatian town on the Medina River west of San Antonio, and she died in 1938 of a fall, aged seventy. She married the court clerk and vampire slayer Barnabas Proctor in 1896, and they raised three children, Edwin Menger Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor and Harriet Proctor, of whom the two daughters became slayers of the Ledger. Ada was not a hunter and was not born into the Proctor line, and the family lists her under no house. The Proctors remember her as the wife who kept the hat shop, kept the accounts of a second household and never once lost a hatbox on a train.
Castroville in 1868 was a village of stone houses with steep roofs and deep cellars, built by settlers from Alsace in the 1840s under the colony of Henri Castro, and its people, who spoke a dialect that nobody else in Texas could follow, kept their own bakeries, their own church and their own opinions. The Mengers were farmers and small tradespeople, and the family papers give Ada's parents only as the Mengers of the Medina, who kept a few acres, a cow and a press for the grapes. She was the third of five, a neat, fair, blue-eyed, contrary child, and she had a talent that nobody could account for. She would pick up whatever was lying about, a scrap of straw, a twist of ribbon, a bird's feather, and make of it something that stood up on a head. By nine she had trimmed the bonnets of the whole Sunday school. By twelve she was being paid for it in eggs.
The straw was the start of it. The Alsatian women of Castroville plaited straw for bonnets in the long winter evenings, a craft that they had brought with them from the Vosges, and Ada learned it at her grandmother's knee and improved on it. She could work a plait so fine that it was taken for a fabric, and so tightly that it would hold a shape for a decade. At fifteen she was sent to San Antonio, twenty-five miles to the east, on the freight wagon, to be apprenticed to a milliner on Houston Street, a Frenchwoman named Mademoiselle Aubry who made hats for the wives of the cattle kings and the German merchants, and who had, it was said, in the front of her shop the only mirror in Texas that did not lie. Ada learned blocking, steaming, wiring and the use of a pin. She learned, above all, to look at a customer and see the hat. She used to say that it was not a matter of the face. It was a matter of what the woman hoped to be when she had the hat on.
By twenty-five she had a small shop of her own, in two rooms on Soledad Street, near the Broadway corner. She sold hats, veils, feathers and ribbons, and she had a workroom in the back with a long table, a steam kettle, a dozen blocks and a bench for the apprentices, and in the front window a single hat on a stand, changed every Monday. She was a success. The cattle-trail years had filled the city with money, and the wives and daughters of the trail drivers and the brokers who made their money in the stockyards wanted something to wear on Sunday that said so. She made them all, from the broad-brimmed straw for a rancher's widow to a blue felt with a veil for a lady who had been to Paris and did not mean to be outdone. She trimmed, by her own count, more than eleven thousand hats.
She met Barnabas Proctor in the autumn of 1895, when he brought her a hat for repair. It was a small grey felt, the kind that a schoolmistress might wear, with a split in the crown, and he had been asked to carry it to the nearest milliner by his sister Martha. She mended it in a quarter of an hour. She then said that it was not a hat for his sister but a hat for a person with a long neck and an alarming temper, and that the real wearer would have to come to the shop for it to be fitted properly. He said that the real wearer was his mother, which was also perfectly true. He was twenty-four, a tall, stooping, sandy man with a pencil behind his ear, who clerked in the county court on Broadway, and who had the gift, which she noticed at once, of saying a great deal less than he knew. She noticed also that he had a revolver under his coat, and had taken the trouble to keep it out of the light.
He told her in March, at the back of the shop, over a cup of tea. He said that the work at the court was a good deal more than it looked, and that the clerk who filed the papers in the county records was in a position to see a good many things that he was not supposed to see, and to move a good many more without being noticed. He said that the Proctors, who had kept the White Ledger since the Wars of the Roses, had found it useful to have one of their own in a place where the paper came in. She asked whether he was a spy. He said that he was a clerk. She said that in her experience it came to the same. He asked whether she would be frightened. She said that she had lived through a flood on the Medina, a cattle stampede and a wedding of four hundred, and that nothing very much frightened her any more, but that she would want to be kept informed. They were married in the spring of 1896, in the church at Castroville, in a hat of her own design, which was mentioned in the San Antonio papers.
Edwin Menger Proctor was born in 1897, a cheerful, round-faced child with his mother's eyes, who was not called to the work and became a dockworker on the Gulf coast. Elizabeth Proctor was born in 1899, and Harriet Proctor in 1903. Both girls were called in their time to be vampire slayers of the White Ledger, in the usual way, and Ada, who watched each of them go out at night in the clothes that she had made, said that she had not raised them to be chased by the dead, but that if they were going to be, she would see that their hats stayed on. It is a measure of her quiet authority that they did.
She worked, in those years, as a courier. The Ledger's Texas chapter had a steady traffic of papers to carry, from San Antonio to the ranches, from the ranches to the German settlements, from the settlements to Castroville and Uvalde and back, and a milliner, who was always going somewhere to buy straw, was the ideal person to carry it. She took the train with four hatboxes and a parasol. Two of the boxes contained hats. The third contained a bundle of route sheets and the fourth a hunter's spare revolver, wrapped in tissue paper and a bonnet. Conductors, who had learned not to touch a lady's hatbox, treated them with a kind of superstitious respect, and in twenty years not one was opened.
Barnabas died in 1919, in the wake of the Great War and in the terrible winter after the influenza, and she was left with three grown children, a shop and the Ledger's papers, which she kept in a drawer of the workroom beneath a pile of buckram. She did not close the shop. She put on a black hat, which she trimmed herself, and went on making the hats of the city for another nineteen years, through the twenties, the Depression and the years when hats went out of fashion and came back in a smaller size. Her daughters helped her in the evenings. They learned to block a crown and to recognise a forged note, and she said that the two were not unrelated.
She died in 1938, of a fall, at seventy, in the workroom, where she had gone up a stepladder to bring down a box of felts. She was found at the foot of the ladder by the youngest apprentice, in her good grey dress, with a hatpin still between her lips. She was buried at San Antonio beside her husband. It was said by the apprentices, who were the most reliable witnesses, that she had fallen with a grey felt in her hands and that it had not been so much as creased.
Ada Menger is remembered in the Proctor family as the milliner of Soledad Street, the wife who carried the Ledger in a hatbox. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet couriers and tradeswomen of the White Ledger, who never raised a weapon, who were trusted with the papers because nobody thought to ask, and who kept the cause going under a brim.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
