Florence Tilton

Broker slayer from a local family, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Grey Ledger. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

Florence Tilton was born in 1676 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or in the settlement that would later take that name, a scatter of Quaker farms and river landings west of the Schuylkill where William Penn's colony was still being surveyed by men on horseback. The land was new and the roads were mostly Indian paths widened by cart wheels. The families who farmed there had come from the English Midlands and the north, the Welsh Tract and the Rhine, and they built log houses and barns of squared timber, grew wheat and flax, traded with the Lenape and Susquehannock neighbours who still hunted the woods, and met on First Day in plain rooms to sit in silence until someone was moved to speak. Florence grew up in that silence and, unlike most children, learned to enjoy it. Her upbringing was Friends' upbringing. She was taught to read from the Bible and from Penn's own tracts, to write a clear plain hand, to keep accounts in the columns that Quakers favoured because they were honest, and to say thee and thy without embarrassment. She learned to spin and to make butter, to dip candles and to pickle, to handle a small boat on the river, and to keep her voice level. There was nothing in her early life to hint at a hunter. Her people were pacifists, in principle, and the flintlock pistol that later hung in her shop was, by the meeting's lights, an abomination. If anything marked her out it was her memory for figures and her habit of remembering who owed what to whom, a habit that would become the foundation of her later craft. She married in 1700, at twenty-four, an unusual match in that her husband was a young man from a Yorkshire Quaker family that had crossed to the province when he was a small boy. Amos Proctor, born in 1680, was a printer's clerk in Philadelphia, a city still being built, with its brick houses rising one street at a time, its wharves crowded with sugar and rum from the Barbados run and its presses turning out almanacs and broadsides for a population that was hungry for print. He had a good hand and a good head, and he had, unspoken at first, a second and stranger vocation. He belonged to the Proctor line, the Yorkist half of the old rivalry, with a descent from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor through the marriage at York in January 1486, and he kept in the bottom of his trunk a copy of the White Ledger's recent pages. Florence learned of it a year after the wedding. She had noticed that Amos slept badly and went out on certain nights, and she asked him plainly, as Friends do, where he had been. He told her. She listened for a long time, and then she asked to see the book. She read down the columns with her finger, the dates and places and marks, and said at length that it was very well kept for a book kept by men, and that she thought she could improve the arrangement. It was as odd a beginning to a hunting partnership as the Slayerverse records, but it was a real one. In 1697, three years before her marriage, something had already happened to her that she had told no one. She had attended a wake at a farm on the Conestoga road, a decent Quaker sort of wake without drink or singing, and toward the end of the night, when the mourners were sitting in their chairs, the dead man had sat up on his board and turned his head toward them. The others had run. Florence, who was twenty-one, had stood where she was, and she had watched what it did, and afterward she remembered every detail. That was her calling. It came to her not as a flash but as a settling, as of a weight arriving on a scale, and she understood, without being told, that she was now a vampire slayer. She did not become the kind of hunter who rushes into the dark. She became a broker. It was an archetype the family had a name for, a slayer whose talent lay in the arrangement of things, in bargaining, in leverage, in knowing what each party wanted and what each could be made to give. Her craft, Procedural Trapping, consisted of setting a sequence of conditions so that a vampire that followed its own habits would walk into a place from which it could not leave. She studied the routes of the creatures she tracked, their hours, their little compulsions, and built a series of small obstacles and inducements that ended, by the third or fourth step, in a room she had prepared. She used the pistol and the hawthorn stakes to finish the work, but the finishing was the least of it. The work was done in the planning, at the kitchen table, with a pen. Her gear was as plain as she was. A flintlock pistol, brass-butted and kept wrapped in oiled cloth, hawthorn stakes cut in the spring and seasoned under the eaves, and a sealed ledger, bound in grey boards, in which she recorded every hunt. The seal was wax and her thumbprint, and it was never broken in front of strangers. The book gave her the name by which the Proctor hunters knew her, the Grey Ledger, partly for its cover and partly for the quiet in which she worked, neither the flame of the Yorkist tally nor the red of the Faulkner one but something between, a record that could be checked. She lent it, in later years, to Proctor cousins who wanted a model of clean accounting, and they returned it with respect. The house she made was in the town, above a small shop, since Amos's clerkship had led to a business of his own and Florence, as a shopkeeper's wife, could sit at the counter all day and hear everything. Her daughters were born there. Florence Tilton Proctor arrived in 1703, named for her mother with the family's double name, and Rachel Proctor followed in 1712. Neither was called, though both grew up knowing what their mother did. They kept the shop books, cooked and mended for the hunters who came through, and sat, as Friends do, in the quiet of a household where the true occupation was never mentioned before the neighbours. Florence Tilton Proctor lived until 1754 and Rachel until 1785, and it was Rachel who kept her mother's grey book in the end. Amos died in 1738, ten years after his wife, and the shop passed to others. Florence died in 1728, at fifty-two, in childbed, in the plain upper room where her daughters had been born. It was a surprise to the midwives and to Florence herself, who had thought that part of her life over. She was buried in the Friends' ground, without a stone, as the Quaker custom required. The Grey Ledger, sealed, went to Rachel. The White Ledger records her as one of the sharpest tacticians of the early Pennsylvania line and notes, in a phrase copied out many times, that she took more vampires than her husband and never raised her voice doing it.