Harriet Bartlett was born in 1861 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived eighty-four years as a laundress among the river landings and horse farms of her native state, and for fifty-three of them as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Grey Quill, a name that recalls both the grey cloth that passed through her tubs and the pen that she never seemed to put down. She was a Spy, which in the Proctor sense means a hunter who works by observation, access and permission, and never if she can help it by the gun, and her craft was Seal and Sanction, the art of lifting a seal without breaking it and of obtaining the sanction, the formal leave to enter, that lets a hunter through a door. Her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She belonged to the Proctor bloodline and married into the House of Thorne. In 1887 she married the cattle drover and slayer Alexander Thorne, and they raised two sons, Joseph Proctor Thorne and Alexander Proctor Thorne, neither of whom hunted. She died in 1945 in a car accident, aged eighty-four.
Lexington in 1861 was a town that could not make up its mind. Kentucky had declared itself neutral and was filling up with soldiers of both sides, the horse farms of the bluegrass were losing their stock to requisition, and the hemp factories stood half idle. Harriet's people were Bartletts, a large, practical, poor family of the Proctor connection that had come up from Virginia by the Wilderness Road a generation before and settled in the tenements behind the market, where they took in washing. She was born in the second winter of the war, in a two-room house on a lane near the Cheapside market, and was, her mother said, a child who stared. She stared at the soldiers, at the wagons and at the piles of linen that came into the yard on Mondays, and she learned to read them before she could read print. A sheet knew, her mother said, everything that had happened to it. The trick was to look at it with your whole face.
It was a trade that taught her a good deal. A laundress in the bluegrass did the linen of the horse farms, the taverns, the boarding houses and the river hotels, and she learned what each household was by what came out of its baskets. She could say which stable hand was ill, which house had guests that it was not admitting to and which bed had been slept in by two people who were not married, and she could do it with a face as blank as a clean pillowcase. She learned the marks. Every great house marked its linen with thread, ink or a stamp, and its cupboards with a seal, and she grew up knowing the seals of half the estates between Lexington and the river. She learned to lift a wax seal with a warm knife and set it back so that the owner would not have known. She had the hands for it. It took her only a few tries. She did not think of it as anything but a thing that she did.
She married at twenty-six. Alexander Thorne was a tall, fair, slow-talking boy of twenty, a cattle drover from the Bourbon County farm of Hob Proctor Thorne, who brought his herds through Lexington on the way to the river boats, and who had a deplorable habit of leaving his shirts behind him in a different town each week. She took the shirts in. She returned them with a note, and he answered the note, and by the winter of 1886 he had stopped leaving shirts and begun leaving flowers. They were married in 1887 in the Presbyterian church in Lexington, by a minister who had been paid in linen. She was told what the Thornes did on the wedding night, in a low voice, by her husband, with a blush, and she said that she had supposed it was something of the kind, since none of his shirts ever had a mark on them. She had, she said, always known that the Thornes kept hounds for a reason.
Her sons came quickly. Joseph Proctor Thorne was born in 1888 and lived until 1953, and Alexander Proctor Thorne, who was born in 1892 and lived until 1974, was to marry in San Antonio and carry the name of the Proctors out to Texas. Neither was called. She kept the boys clean, fed and lettered, in the small house on the farm lane, with the wash-boilers going in the yard, and she went on taking in linen, since a drover's wages were irregular and a laundress's were not.
It was in the year of her younger son's birth that she was called. It came in 1892, in a cellar. She had gone out to a horse farm on the Georgetown pike, one of the old places with a stone house and a long avenue, to collect the week's washing, and found the kitchen door open, the fire warm and the house silent. She went through the rooms. There were beds made and a meal laid. She went down to the cellar for the linen chest and found the household stores untouched, the hams on their hooks, the barrels sealed, the jars in rows, and the people gone. There were eleven of them on that farm. There was no sign of a struggle, and not one of the provisions had been taken, and she stood in the cold dark among the barrels for a full minute before she understood what she was looking at. A house that has been emptied for a hunger that is not for food.
She did not scream. She looked at the seal on the cellar door, which had been broken from outside and closed again with a great deal of care, and she understood that she was looking at the work of someone, or something, that knew how a seal was meant to look. She took a candle end and a knife from her apron and examined it. Then she went upstairs, put the washing in her basket and walked the four miles home. She wrote down what she had seen, in a fair hand, and in the morning she took it to Hob Proctor Thorne, her father-in-law, who read it twice and said that he had been waiting for someone in the family to notice that a seal was a kind of promise.
Seal and Sanction became her craft from that week. A hunter must enter a house, she learned, and a house has to give its leave, and a laundress can go anywhere that a laundress is sent for. She took to visiting the big houses and the river hotels in the course of her ordinary rounds, and she learned to read the letters in a butler's pocket, the seal on a solicitor's packet and the sanction of a steward's pass, and to give the hunters what they needed, which was the moment at which the door would be open. She was not a great fighter. She carried a pistol and silver-tipped stakes in the bottom of her basket, under the damp sheets, and she used them a dozen times in her life, and was said to have been meticulous in her records, and never to have lost a garment.
Her husband died in 1900, leaving her a widow at thirty-nine with two boys of twelve and eight, and she took up the wash-boilers with a new and fearful energy. She kept the farm lane house. She brought the boys up, sent the younger to a school in the town, and went on working the landings and the farms. The Great War took neither of her sons to France, to her relief, though it took the horses of the bluegrass by the thousand. In the influenza epidemic of 1918 she washed the linen of a fever hospital on Limestone Street for six weeks, and boiled it twice, and took a good deal of pleasure in noting that nobody who had ever looked at her face had asked what was in the basket.
She took a motor-car at seventy-five, in 1936, against the advice of everyone, and drove it with the same steady, suspicious attention that she gave a wax seal. She was killed in it in 1945, at eighty-four, on the Paris pike, when a lorry from the remount depot came round a bend on the wrong side of the road.
Harriet Bartlett is remembered in the Thorne family as The Grey Quill, the laundress who could open any letter and close it again, and who knew who had slept where. In the Slayerverse she stands for the spies of the White Ledger, the hunters who got through the door because they had the right papers, and who understood that the sanction of a house is the first weapon and the last.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
