Jonathan Shelby was a man who spent his working life in the saddle and died there, or very nearly. He was born in 1703 at Germantown, Pennsylvania, a linen-weaving town of German and Dutch settlers a few miles north-west of Philadelphia, and he died in 1742, aged 39, of a fall from a horse. He served as a militiaman, married into the Proctor family in 1723, and fathered two children who bore their mother's name, not his. In the White Ledger he appears as an outsider who was trusted, which the keepers of that book did not say lightly of anyone who had not been born to it.
Of his parents nothing is recorded, and neither the Proctor papers nor the town records of Germantown name them. What is known of his early world is the place itself. Germantown in 1703 was scarcely twenty years old, founded by Quaker and Mennonite families from the Rhineland, and its main street ran in a single long line of stone houses with steep roofs, each with its own garden and its own weaver's loom. The air smelled of wet flax and woodsmoke. The people spoke German in their homes and English in the market, and they had a hard-won habit of self-reliance, having come across the Atlantic to a place where there was nobody to help them but each other. Boys there learned to work with their hands and to keep their opinions to themselves, and Jonathan grew up steady, quiet and useful.
He had a way with horses, and it was probably that which took him out of the weavers' town and into the saddle. As a young man he worked as a carrier and drover on the roads between Germantown, Philadelphia and the settlements to the west, and he came to know the Pennsylvania country as a rider knows it, by its fords, its hills and its inns. He joined a company of the militia in the early 1720s. The Quaker province had no compulsory system of arms, and the provincial assembly, dominated by Friends, looked askance at soldiers, but there were volunteer companies of a kind, made up of men of other persuasions, and on the frontier there were rangers and watchers who rode out when the settlers were alarmed. Jonathan was one of these. He carried a musket, a horn, and a short sword, and was expected to be ready to ride at an hour's notice.
It was through this service that he met the Proctors. The White Ledger records that in the early 1720s a company he rode with was called out to a farm in the Lancaster country, where a family had gone silent and the cattle were dead in the byre. He and the others found there a woman in a grey cloak, who did the work that needed doing with a swift, unshowy competence that impressed him and did not scare him. That woman was Florence Tilton, the shopkeeper's wife, known to the ledger as The Grey Ledger. She and her husband Amos Proctor had a daughter of about Jonathan's age, Florence Tilton Proctor, who kept a milliner's shop, and Jonathan called at it, that autumn, to buy a ribbon for a sister he did not have. The excuse was so thin that the girl laughed at him, and he came again.
They were married in 1723, when both were twenty. Jonathan was not a Quaker by birth, but he adapted with a good grace to the manners of the household, and he was easy in the company of the plain-spoken Friends who made up so many of his wife's customers. He also learned, gradually, what the family did. The Proctors did not tell him all at once; they watched him, tested him with small confidences, and only after a couple of years of marriage did they sit him down at the kitchen table and tell him of the White Ledger. It is recorded that he listened to the whole account, from the Wars of the Roses to the escape of the Guest at Towton, without interrupting, and then said only that he had wondered why the Proctor women never seemed frightened.
He never became a slayer. The calling did not come to him, and he did not seek it. But he made himself useful in the ways an outsider could. His military position gave him a natural reason to ride the roads at night, and he carried messages, escorted tired hunters home and, more than once, lent his company to a hunt as a piece of ordinary cover: a body of armed men in a dark field looks like a militia patrol, and no one asks questions. He also taught his father-in-law's cousins how to sit a horse at speed over broken ground, which was of some use, and taught his wife a thing or two about the management of a mare.
Two children came of the marriage. Jonathan Shelby Proctor was born in 1725 and lived until 1780, and Naomi Proctor was born in 1727 and lived until 1770. The children took the Proctor name, in the family's way, though the boy kept his father's name in the middle of his own, as a sign that the household remembered where he came from. Jonathan doted on both and had a habit of putting them up on the saddle in front of him for a slow turn round the yard, which they remembered all their lives.
He was killed in 1742. The horse was a young grey mare that he had been schooling for a neighbour, and on a wet spring morning on the road beside the Conestoga she put a foot wrong on a slick bank, went down, and took him over her head onto the stones. He lived a few hours. He was thirty-nine, and his wife, then also thirty-nine, was at his side. He was buried in the Lancaster neighbourhood, and the militia company sent a rider with a black armband to the funeral. The White Ledger's keepers wrote his name into the margin of the entry for that year, the mark they used for a friend of the house, and the Proctors of the next generation remembered him as a steady presence, a horseman, a decent man and one of the few outsiders the Ledger ever fully accepted. The Slayerverse holds many like him, whose names do not appear in the tally but without whom the tally would not have been kept.
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