The dogs would not go near the body. That was the detail Charity Woodbury returned to when she was asked, in later years, how she had known. In the autumn of 1761, when she was twenty, a stranger was found dead in a barn on a farm outside Harrisonburg, Virginia, and the farm's three hounds, ordinarily brave to the point of foolishness, stood in the yard with their hackles up and would not cross the threshold. Charity, who had been sent over with a basket of dried yarrow and comfrey for the farmer's sick wife, walked into the barn instead. She looked at the man's throat, at the flat unmarked skin where a wound should have been, and at the straw around him, which was undisturbed and dry. She understood, with a completeness she could not have explained, what she was looking at. That was her calling, and she was later known in the White Ledger as the vampire slayer called The Meek Seal.
She was born in 1741 in Harrisonburg, in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley, when the town was little more than a courthouse-to-be, a few taverns and a scatter of German and Scots-Irish farms strung along the roads. Her family were unaffiliated with either of the old slayer houses, plain people of the valley who paid their tithes, ploughed limestone soil and traded eggs and flax at market. Her mother taught her the herbs. By the age of ten she could tell boneset from pennyroyal by smell in the dark, and by fifteen she was the person the neighbouring farms sent for when a child had the croup or a cow had the bloat. She dried her plants in bundles under the rafters and made salves in a blackened iron pot. A herbalist of that time and place was part midwife and part apothecary, and she walked the wagon roads from farm to farm with a bag on her shoulder, which gave her a knowledge of the countryside that almost nobody else possessed.
The nickname came from her manner. Charity was small, soft-spoken and given to lowering her eyes when a man addressed her, and people assumed she was timid. The assumption was useful to her. She discovered early in her work that a woman who looks harmless is told things, and that a herbalist is admitted to bedsides, cellars and sickrooms where she can see what others miss. What her neighbours took for meekness was a habit of patience. Her craft, which the ledger calls Procedural Trapping, was built out of that patience. It was not a single feat of arms but a method, a way of turning a hunt into a sequence of small preparations, each one steps ahead of the quarry. She would learn a creature's habits, find its walking route, mark where it fed and where it rested, and then prepare the ground: a rope across a path, a lure of fresh blood in a sealed jar, a door fitted with a silver bar, a barn made ready as a cage. By the time the thing arrived she had left it nowhere to go.
Her gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot. She cast the balls herself over a kitchen fire, in a mould she borrowed from a gunsmith's widow, working slowly because silver was expensive and would not forgive a careless pour. The rifle was a Pennsylvania-style piece of the sort the valley gunsmiths made, long in the barrel and light in the stock, and she carried it wrapped in oilcloth against the damp. She was never a fast shot. She was an exact one, and her trapping meant she rarely needed to be fast. The hunt that established her among the Proctor slayers came in 1763, when she baited and closed a barn on the south fork of the river against a creature that had been taking cattle and, later, a drover. She held the door with a chain and a rope for a night and a day, and when it came to the killing she did it from a loft window with a single shot. The entry went into the White Ledger under her name.
It was through the ledger that she met Jonas Proctor. He was two years her junior, born in 1743, a surveyor's chainman who spent his working life walking measured lines across the valley and the ridge country beyond, and he was himself a slayer of the Proctor house. They were introduced by an older hunter who thought that the two of them, one careful and one restless, would balance. They were married in 1762, a year after her calling, in a plain ceremony followed by a dinner of ham, cornbread and dried-apple pie. Jonas taught her to read a landscape the way a surveyor does, in bearings and distances. She taught him to be still. Together they hunted the upper valley for the next decade and a half, and the ledger records more than a dozen kills to their joint credit, some of them taken at farms where nobody ever learned what had been in the barn.
Their children were born into the work. Mary Woodbury Proctor came in 1765 and Obadiah Proctor in 1766, and neither of them was called, which the parents accepted without comment. Levi Proctor followed in 1774 and Lydia Proctor in 1775, and both of those two grew into slayers themselves. The household was a busy, well-provisioned place with a garden of herbs behind the house and a room at the back where Charity made her silver shot. The children learned early to leave her drying racks alone and to be quiet when the rifle was being oiled. She was a firm and affectionate mother, who read to them from the Bible in the evenings and quietly taught them what the ledger meant.
The Revolution scattered the household's energies. Jonas was pulled into the war as a scout for the army, using his skill with routes and distances to guide detachments through the mountain passes and to mark where the enemy's roads ran. He was gone for long stretches. Charity kept the farm, delivered her neighbours' babies, and continued to keep watch over the valley alone, adding to her tally of kills at a slower pace. Her care in the trapping method proved its worth in those years, for she could not afford to be reckless with three small children and no husband at home. In these years the family also felt the old rivalry with the Faulkners, since news travelled up and down the Great Wagon Road, and Faulkner tallies from the Massachusetts and Kentucky lines were much discussed at the Proctor table. Charity kept her own count and did not boast.
She died in 1779, at the age of thirty-eight, of a fall from a horse. She was riding back late from a confinement at a farm on the far side of the ridge when the horse shied on wet stone and went down with her. Jonas, when word reached him, came home from the army on a borrowed mare. He survived her by twenty years, dying in 1799, and never remarried. The younger children were raised by relatives and by their elder siblings. Levi and Lydia went on to make their own names in the ledger, and both of them carried a good deal of their mother's method.
Charity's entries in the White Ledger are notable for their brevity and their neatness. The Meek Seal appears in the record as a hunter who almost never lost a night to failure and never took credit she had not earned. Her craft of Procedural Trapping became a teaching example among the later Proctors, who used her preparations as a model for how to close a hunt before it began. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the quiet herbalist of Harrisonburg who read a stranger's death in the behaviour of three frightened dogs.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
