Nettie Thorne

Gangster slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Thorne), known as The Narrow Seal. Craft: Record Tracing.

Nettie Thorne was born in 1870 at Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-four years as a seamstress and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book knows her as The Narrow Seal, a name that fits a woman who was small, dark and exact and who made a mark that could not be copied. She was a Gangster, which in the White Ledger's sense means a hunter who works a district the way a boss works a ward, by reputation, favours, protection and the fear of being noticed, and her craft was Record Tracing, the art of following a creature through the paper it cannot help leaving behind. She carried a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was the younger child of the farmer and slayer Hob Proctor Thorne, The Fallow Yoke, and of the farmer's wife Effie Bradford, and she trained under her father. Her brother was Alexander Thorne. In 1892 she married the dockworker Lewis Eaton, and they raised two sons, Benjamin Eaton Proctor and Lewis Proctor, neither of whom hunted. She died in 1944 of cancer, aged seventy-four, in the city that she had worked for more than half a century. She was born in the wrong place, as the Thornes counted such things, because in the spring of 1870 her parents were on a river packet. Hob had been engaged to see a consignment of Kentucky mules down to the planters' agents at New Orleans, and Effie, who was heavy with the second child and did not care to be left behind in Bourbon County with a cough going round the neighbourhood, came with him to visit a Bradford cousin who had married a ship's chandler at Algiers. The baby came three weeks early, in the back room of the chandler's house, with the wharves of the Algiers drydocks ringing outside and the cousin holding a basin. Hob, who was standing at the foot of the bed with his hat in his hand, said that he had been a good many places, but had never before been in a room that smelled so strongly of tar. She was carried back up the river at six weeks, in a basket, in the cabin of a boat called the Natchez Belle, and said, when she was old, that she had known what the Mississippi was before she could see it. She grew up on the farm off the Maysville pike, and was the practical one. Her brother was big, fair and slow. She was dark, small, brisk and sharp-tongued, with her mother's talent for seeing what was about to go wrong and her father's for putting a figure against it. She sewed from the age of eight, learned from a neighbour, and by fifteen had a needle so fast that the women of the pike began to bring her their work. She also went through other people's saddlebags, for the joy of finding out, and was regularly returned to her mother by the farm's hands with a bundle of things that she had pilfered and listed. Her father noticed that she had listed them correctly. It was the first he knew of the gift. Her father taught her the terms, as he had taught her brother the hounds, at the kitchen table, on winter evenings, with a pack of cards. He said that a record was the same thing as a bargain, because in both a man wrote down what he would do and then spent the rest of his life trying not to. She was quick at it. By seventeen she could read a bill of lading at a glance and an account book upside down, and she could tell from the crossings-out in a day-book whether the man had been honest or merely frightened. The Thorne papers held, in a chest in the loft, a long history of the old Border rolls, kept by reivers who had had to reckon what was owed to whom, and she read it through in a winter. It was Record Tracing in its rudiments. It was, as her father said, no more than the habit of asking what the paper said that the man had hoped nobody would read. She left for New Orleans in 1889, at nineteen, on the advice of a cousin of the Red Ledger who had seen her work and had a place for her at a dressmaker's in Royal Street. She went down by the packet, with a carpet bag, a thimble and a letter, and took a room in a boarding house in the Quarter. She did not go home at Christmas. The dressmaker, a stout widow from Bordeaux, found that the girl from Kentucky would finish a gown in a day and a half, and gave her the better clients. Within a year she was altering ball dresses for the wives of cotton factors, and hearing, from under a pile of silk and with her mouth full of pins, everything that the city said to its dressmaker. She listened, and entered it, in a small black book, in a hand that she had made deliberately narrow. She was called in the autumn of 1890, at twenty, on a Sunday morning in Algiers, where she had gone to see the chandler's house in which she was born. The bell-ringer of the parish church, a cheerful old Breton who rang the noon bell every day and was known to the whole ferry landing, did not come down from his tower. The bell stopped halfway through. The congregation waited, and then a boy was sent up, and came down again a great deal faster than he had gone. Nettie, who was standing at the church door with a parcel of mended surplices that she had promised to deliver, walked past the verger and climbed the stair. She had, by this time, the habit of noticing. She noticed that the trapdoor to the belfry had been dragged shut from the inside, that the rope was wet and that the old man's parish register, which he had carried up to read, was lying on the floorboards with a line inked through. She read the line. It was the entry for a baptism at that church in 1804. The child had been listed as buried in 1806, and the name had been struck through, in fresh ink, by somebody who had meant to make a dead child vanish from the record. She stood in the belfry with the page in her hand, and understood, with an almost comic calm, that she was looking at something that had been hiding in the paper for eighty-six years. It was the register, not the creature, that she followed. She spent six weeks in the parish and the cathedral archives, cross-referencing baptisms, burials, tax rolls and the manifests of the Algiers ferry, and in the end she found, in a notary's book in a bricked-up room on Conti Street, the trail of a family whose name had changed four times and whose members had never aged. She took the thing on a January night at its own door, with a pistol, stakes and the notary's book under her arm, and showed it its name. Her father, to whom she sent an account in a long and extremely dry letter, wrote back that she had found a record that she could not destroy, and had, as a consequence, done the only thing a record was for. He sent her a pistol with the letter, and a cheque for ten dollars. Record Tracing in her practice was a Gangster's method, because she kept a whole district in her ledger. She knew the clerks, the sextons, the notaries, the harbour officers and the women who washed the dead, and she paid for information in favours, in finished gowns and in an unspoken threat that she remembered everything. A notary who let a false name slip through would find a seamstress at his door, with a measuring tape, and would be measured very thoroughly. She was said, in the Quarter, to be the small woman who knew what you had signed. She took some thirty vampires in fifty years, and of them perhaps six with a gun. She married in 1892, at twenty-two, a dockworker called Lewis Eaton, a big, patient, brown man from the Algiers levee who lifted cotton bales at the Poydras Street wharves and sang while he did it. He was not a hunter and was not of the Thorne house. He had come to her door with a torn shirt, and she mended it, and told him, rather than asking, that she would be glad to be invited to supper. He was the kindest man she knew. He never asked where she went at night, only whether she had eaten, and on the evenings when she came in late and white-faced he put a plate in front of her and turned his back and sang. Benjamin Eaton Proctor was born in 1894, and Lewis Proctor in 1896. Both were entered in the White Ledger under the Proctor name, through her father's middle name, and neither was called. Benjamin went into the shipping offices, and Lewis, who was quiet, went on the wharves like his father, and lived until 1948. She kept her trade through everything. She sewed through the years of Storyville, when half the dresses in the Quarter passed across her table, and she sewed through the influenza of 1918, when she hunted by night and made shrouds by day, and nursed her husband through the fever with a pot of broth and a rigid refusal to let him speak of it. Lewis died in 1933, in the Depression, and she kept his cap on the nail. She hunted into her seventies. She died in 1944, of cancer, at seventy-four, in a room over her own sewing table on Dauphine Street, with her younger son beside her and her black book open on the quilt. Nettie Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The Narrow Seal, the seamstress of the Quarter, the small woman who found out what had been signed. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Gangsters of the White Ledger, the hunters who held a district by knowing it, who worked with needle, paper and favour, and who never believed that a thing could be hidden in a register that she had not yet read.