Martha Pinkney

Spouse of Joseph Proctor Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Martha Pinkney was a seamstress who could tell a person's trade, temper and last quarrel from the way a sleeve hung, and she made her living, for thirty years, on the strength of it. She was born in 1891 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and worked at the dress shops and kitchen tables of New Orleans until she died in 1943 of a sudden collapse, aged fifty-two. In 1912 she married the telegraph operator Joseph Proctor Thorne, and they had two sons, Norman Thorne, who became a slayer, and Edward Thorne, who did not. She belonged to no house of the Ledger and was born to no bloodline of it, though she married into the White Ledger of the Proctors by way of her husband's grandmother, a line that goes back to Isabel Proctor, who married Thomas Faulkner in January 1486. She was not a hunter. She was, as the family says, the one who cut the cloth: for thirty years she made the coats, the dresses and the long deep pockets that carried the Thorne hunters' silver across the city without a clink. She was born in a rented house on a back street of Lafayette, a railroad town in the Acadian prairie country, where the Southern Pacific tracks ran through the middle of the main street and the cotton gins smoked in autumn. French was the language of the market and English of the depot. Her father was a harness-maker from Alabama, a fair, gaunt man with a soft voice, who had come to Louisiana for the horses and stayed for a Pinkney's reason, which was a girl, and her mother was a Thibodaux woman with a sewing machine and a will of iron. Martha was the second of three daughters. She was a small, dark, freckled child with a fierce attention to detail, who was found at five picking out her sister's stitches because they were uneven and doing them again with her tongue between her teeth. Her mother, who held that talent should never be praised in the hearing of the talented, said that she would do. Her father died of a lung fever when she was eight, and her mother, who saw no future in a harness shop without a harness-maker, took the three girls down to Thibodaux, to a sister, and set up a small dressmaker's in the front room of a house on the bayou. It was a hard school. The women of the sugar parishes dressed for church, funerals and the occasional wedding, and expected their clothes to be exactly right. Martha learned to cut a pattern from a newspaper, to turn a collar and to put in a sleeve that would stand a lifetime of washing and a bad temper. She learned, above all, to look. She would watch a customer cross the room, and see, from the set of the shoulders and the fall of a skirt, where the dress would pull, and she had it pinned before the woman had sat down. At sixteen she went to New Orleans to work in a dress shop on Canal Street, and she lived in a boarding house in the Marigny with a landlady who had views on gentlemen callers. The shop made gowns for the daughters of the cotton factors and the sugar brokers, and Martha, who was put at a long table among a dozen other girls, discovered that she was faster than all of them. She learned beading, boning and the use of the steam iron. She learned to finish a hem by hand, so invisibly that the customers refused to believe that it had been done. By nineteen she had her own corner, with a window, and a customer list that the proprietress guarded as she would have guarded her jewels. She met her husband on a wet Friday in the spring of 1911, in the telegraph office on Gravier Street. She had come in to send a message to her mother in Thibodaux and wrote it out in so beautiful a hand that the young man at the counter, a thin, fair, watchful operator of twenty-two with ink on his fingers, stopped counting the words and began to read. She told him that it was a great deal for a single sentence. He said that he would send it for nothing if she would tell him what it said. It said that she was getting on well. He took the message, and sent it, and charged her for it, and then, in a gesture that she regarded as the first piece of real romance in her life, walked round to the shop on Canal Street the following Saturday with a receipt that she did not need. They were married in 1912, at St Mary's, with her mother in the front pew in a dress that Martha had made, and his mother, the laundress Harriet Bartlett, who inspected every seam of it as she came up the aisle and said at the church door that it would do. He told her, in the first year of marriage, what the family was. He did it in the plainest manner, on the gallery of the small house in the Marigny, at night, with a lamp, and she heard it out, and asked, at the end of it, how much silver a person could carry in a coat before it showed. He did not know. She measured. In the week that followed she took a hunter's coat that his mother had worn for twenty years and unpicked it, seam by seam, to see how the old Faulkner tailors had put it together, and made, in a night, a new one that hung as an ordinary coat and held a stake, a flask and a pistol without a ripple. Harriet, who had been wearing the old one for twenty years and had never once suspected that it could be improved, put on the new coat in the kitchen, sat down, and said nothing for a quarter of an hour. Then she said that she would have a second. It was the beginning of a long business. Martha made, in thirty years, some two hundred coats, jackets and skirts for the hunters of the Ledger's Louisiana chapter, in plain dark wool and heavy twill, with the deep inner pocket for the silver and the flat one for the knife, and a lining of oiled silk that kept out the river damp. She never charged for them. She said that it was her contribution. She took the measurements herself, at a long table in her workroom with a tape and a pencil, and the hunters, who had never been looked at so carefully by anyone, stood in a row with their arms held out, like soldiers at a fitting. She asked no questions. She asked only whether they could still raise their arms, and when they said that they could, she let out a seam. Her sons were born in the first years of the household, and she dressed them as she dressed everyone, with an eye to what they would need. Norman Thorne was born in 1915, in the second summer of the war, a stern, dark, silent infant who looked at his mother as though trying to recall her, and lived until 2005. He took, when he was old enough, to his grandmother Harriet and was called in his turn to the work of a slayer. Edward Thorne was born in 1918, in the same autumn as the influenza, a round, cheerful, easy baby with no hunting in him at all, who lived until 1994 and became a bookkeeper. Martha, who was twenty-seven, nursed him through the epidemic in a bedroom with the windows open and a sheet soaked in vinegar over the door, and lost neither of her sons nor her husband, and said afterward that it was the only occasion on which she had ever wanted a coat that would cut out fear. The Mississippi flood of 1927 found her on the second floor of the house in the Marigny with a sewing machine, a pot of beans and eleven neighbours. The water never came as far as the street, but the city did not know that, and for three weeks the whole of the Marigny waited for the levees to break. She sewed. She made sandbags, which she said were the simplest garments she had ever cut, and a quantity of rough shirts for the men on the levee, and a banner, which she was to regret, for a parade. When the Depression came, the dress shops of Canal Street laid off their hands by the dozen, and she took her trade to her own front room, where, from a table in the window, she turned the neighbours' collars and made over their coats. She was never without work. A woman who could make a coat last twenty years was worth more, in the lean years, than one who made a new dress. She died in the winter of 1943, at fifty-two, in her workroom, at the pressing table, in the middle of a sleeve. She had gone in after supper to finish a coat for a cousin of the chapter, and her husband, who came to fetch her at ten, found her sitting in front of the iron with her hands in her lap and her head bent as though she were looking closely at the seam. The doctor said that she had been dead for an hour. The coat, which was on the table, was finished to the last stitch except for a single button, which she had left, in a saucer, beside the thread. Joseph sewed it on himself. It was said that the stitching was a disgrace, and that the cousin never wore the coat without touching it. Martha Pinkney is remembered in the Thorne family as the seamstress of the Marigny, the wife who put the Ledger's silver in a coat and never let it show. In the Slayerverse she stands for the tailors and needleworkers of the White Ledger, the people who never took the field and who dressed its hunters so well that the dark did not see them coming, one fitted seam at a time.