Florence Tilton Proctor

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

Florence Tilton Proctor was born in 1703 at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or rather at the scatter of farms and trading posts that would later be organised under that name, in a country where the Susquehanna was still the edge of the known world for most English speakers. She grew up among Quaker meetings and river landings, became a milliner of some reputation, married a militiaman who died young, and was herself killed by a fall from a horse in 1754, aged 51. Her life fell across the most anxious stretch of Pennsylvania's colonial history, and she carried the White Ledger's business through it with a milliner's patience and a mother's iron. Her father was Amos Proctor, born in 1680, a printer's clerk in a city still being built. The city was Philadelphia, and in those decades it was a place of raw brick, new wharves and a grid of streets laid out by a man who had wanted a green country town. Amos set type, corrected proofs and delivered bundles of almanacs and broadsides to shops along Front Street. He was also a slayer, known in the White Ledger as The Delaware Clerk, and he died in 1738. He used his employment as a cover: a printer's clerk who goes about the river wards at odd hours, carrying parcels, is invisible in a way that a gentleman is not, and the print shop itself was a fine place to keep a private tally. Her mother was Florence Tilton, born in 1676, a shopkeeper's wife, who died in 1728, and she too was a slayer. Her alias was The Grey Ledger, given her for the small, cold accuracy of her accounts. The daughter took her name. Florence grew up, then, in a household where the ordinary business of trade and the extraordinary business of the White Ledger were done at the same table. She learned early to keep her mouth shut, to notice who was watching, and to write a hand clear enough to be read by a tired person at midnight. She learned reading and figures at a Quaker school in the neighbourhood and was taught by her mother to sew, and in time the sewing became the work she did with most pride. She apprenticed herself, at fifteen or so, to a milliner, and by her early twenties she had a small shop of her own, selling hoods, caps, aprons, ribbons and imported lace to the wives of farmers and river captains. The Quaker fashion in that country was plain, but plain does not mean cheap, and there was a good living in dove-grey and white linen cut precisely right. She had one sibling, a sister named Rachel Proctor, born in 1712, nine years her junior, who was not a slayer and who grew into a gentle, reserved young woman. Florence was in a sense both elder sister and second mother, as their own mother died when Rachel was sixteen and Florence twenty-five. By then Florence was already married. In 1723, at the age of twenty, she had wed Jonathan Shelby, a young man of Germantown who served in the militia, and the couple made their first home in the town where she had been born. The wedding was a modest one. Quaker practice, which the bride's family observed at least in outline, held that a marriage was made by the couple's own declaration, without a priest, before witnesses, and the certificate that resulted was signed by neighbours and kin. Their two children came soon. Jonathan Shelby Proctor was born in 1725, and Naomi Proctor in 1727. The surname passed through Florence, in the way of the family's custom, and both children were raised as Proctors, though their father's name was kept as a middle name for the boy. Jonathan lived until 1780, and Naomi until 1770, and neither took up the calling. Florence brought them up with a mixture of the meeting-house and the ledger: they learned to sit in silence for an hour, to speak plainly and to keep an account, and if they suspected there was something else at the edge of their mother's attention, they had the manners not to ask. The years of the wars with France on the frontier were the great fear of her life. The war of the 1740s and then the beginnings of the next brought raiding parties to the backcountry farms, and refugees came down the roads to Lancaster and Philadelphia with what they could carry. In the colony the Quaker leadership kept its pacifism, and the question of a militia was a matter of bitter argument, so that Jonathan's service was of a rough and voluntary kind, a matter of frontier watching, drill and road patrols rather than a regular corps. He rode much, and he rode hard, and in 1742 he was killed in a fall from his horse, at the age of thirty-nine. Florence was left a widow at thirty-nine herself, with two children aged seventeen and fifteen, a shop and a ledger. She wore grey. She went on working. Her role in those years was as an organiser. The Proctors of Pennsylvania were scattered, the hunters ranging out along the rivers and across the ridges, and the milliner's shop in Lancaster became a place where messages could be left without a second glance. A customer who came in to collect a hat might also collect a folded note, and a slayer's wife might buy a length of ribbon and depart with a report of a wolf-pack that was not a wolf-pack. The information was brought to the White Ledger keepers at regular intervals. She did not hunt, but her writing appears in the ledger's record of the period more than any other woman's, and it is characterised by a fine plain discipline: names, dates, places, no adjectives. Her feelings toward the Faulkner house were not sharp. She knew the story of Towton and she knew the Guest, and she had a Proctor's private certainty of who was to blame, but the Faulkners were far away in Massachusetts and it was hard to feel great hatred for people who wrote so seldom. Once, in the early 1740s, she and a cousin sent a parcel of caps to Massachusetts as a present, and a courteous letter of thanks came back from a milliner in Ipswich. Neither woman knew quite what to make of it. She died in 1754, aged 51, of a fall from a horse, exactly as her husband had twelve years before, and the coincidence was remarked on in the family with a certain grim humour. She was buried near the Quaker burying ground at Lancaster, without a stone, as the custom was. In the annals of the Slayerverse she is remembered as one of the Proctor women who ran the business behind the business, keeping a shop, a household and a secret tally in one steady hand.