Susan Bowen

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

Susan Bowen was born in 1685 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a young inland market settlement in the country that William Penn's surveyors had only lately laid out into townships and roads. She belonged to no slayer house and carried no name from the Faulkner or Proctor lines, and for most of her short life she had no idea that the tally books of two English families, begun in the Wars of the Roses more than two centuries earlier, would ever touch her. What the wiki records of her is the record of a working seamstress, a Friends' meeting neighbour and, from 1713, the wife of a schoolmaster who would become a vampire slayer, and it is in the ordinary things she did that her value to the family lies. The Lancaster of her childhood was raw. The Susquehanna country to the west was still mostly Conestoga and Susquehannock hunting ground, treaty lines were argued over at Philadelphia, and settlers came up the Great Road in Conestoga wagons and on foot with their goods tied in bundles. The Bowens, a plain family of the sort that keep no written pedigree, lived close to the meeting house, and Susan learned early the Quaker habit of silence at the beginning of a day. She was taught her letters from a hornbook by a neighbour widow and her stitching by her own hands, on the principle that a girl in a new settlement who could not sew was a burden and one who could was a small business. Homespun linen, tow cloth and the occasional length of English broadcloth passed across her lap before she was twelve. She learned to cut on the straight grain, to gather a sleeve, to work a buttonhole that would outlast the garment and to darn a stocking so that the mend lay flat. By the time she was grown, seamstress was the honest word for what she did, and it covered a good deal. She made shifts, aprons, plain gowns in drab and grey, caps and the broad-brimmed bonnets that the meeting approved. She turned collars, let out waistbands for the pregnant and took in the clothes of the dead. She sat by lamplight in the kitchens of farm families on stitching days, when neighbours gathered with their needles and their news, and in those rooms she heard everything: who owed whom for a barrel of flour, whose cow had gone dry, whose son had come home from the woods with a fever and an odd, unblinking manner. She was known for holding her tongue about what she heard, and the habit shaped her marriage as well. Contemporaries described her as small, straight-backed and quick, with ink-dark hair kept under a plain cap and a dry, sudden humour that startled visitors who had taken her silence for shyness. She met Norman Proctor Lister in the river landings country, where his work as a schoolmaster brought him along the roads between farms and where his mother's family had been settled since the 1680s. He was four years her junior, born in 1689, a tall, cautious, rather formal young man who taught reading, ciphering and a little Latin to the children of Quaker farmers and rivermen, and he was known to be careful with his money and with his words. Lister spoke to her first about a coat. It needed relining, and he had noticed that the last coat she had mended for a neighbour had been done with such care that the seam could not be found. The courtship that followed was mostly a matter of walks after meeting, the swapping of borrowed books and a great deal of quiet sitting in the company of her family. They were married in 1713 according to Friends' practice, in the plain manner and without a priest, each speaking the vows before the assembled meeting and signing a certificate afterwards that half the district witnessed. Susan brought her tools, a chest of good needles from London, a featherbed and her own reputation for reliability. The first years of the marriage were the happiest of her life, by every surviving account. Their son Amos Lister was born in 1715 and their daughter Mary Lister in 1717, and the household filled with the sounds of a small schoolroom that had followed its master home. Susan sewed by day at the window that faced the lane and Norman marked slates at the table. She made the children's first breeches and pinafores and cut down her husband's old coats to fit them as they grew. Amos was a placid, watchful boy who took after her, and Mary, the family remembered, was the sort of child who asked why a thing had to be so and then went out to test it. Susan never told either of them what she came, later, to know about their father's family, and it is recorded that she kept the household accounts with a precision Norman could never match, so that the bills for candles, thread and schoolbooks were paid before the last day of the month. The turning point of her married life came in 1720, when Norman was called as a vampire slayer after a quarrel with a brother ended with the brother returning from the grave to finish it. Susan was the person who first saw what had happened to him: she noticed that he had stopped sleeping through the night, that he came to bed smelling of wet earth and lamp oil, and that he carried a long rifle where he had never carried one before. Her response, in the family's telling, was not hysterics but questions. She asked him plainly what he had seen, listened to the answer without interrupting and then sat up with him until the grey of morning working out how a schoolmaster and a seamstress might arrange their household so that one man could be out at night without the neighbours guessing. It was Susan who devised the cover story of his errands for the meeting's poor. It was Susan who sewed the inner pockets into his coats to carry the silver-cast shot, and who altered his greatcoat so that the long rifle could hang under it. Norman took the alias of the Wary Wren; there is no evidence that she ever used it aloud, but she is said to have called him her careful bird. There is no ledger entry in her hand, because the White Ledger of the Proctors was kept by the family, and Susan was not of the family by blood. Yet her name turns up in the margins, in the form of small notes about garments, a coat lined against the damp of a river marsh, gloves cut without seams so that a hunter could feel the lock of his rifle. She never claimed the craft, which Norman called Witness Reading and which she seemed to possess in a smaller domestic form, for a seamstress who has heard a hundred kitchens can tell whose account of an evening will hold and whose will not. When he was frustrated by a story that would not add up, she was often the first to see where the seam had been let out. Susan Bowen died in 1724, at the age of thirty-nine. The family record says of old age, a phrase the wiki keeps as it is written, though it sits oddly on a woman so young; the likelier meaning is that the years of night watching, of sitting up over lamps and of stitching in bad light had worn her out before her time, and that no physician or neighbour could give the decline any sharper name. She was buried in the Friends' burying ground under a plain stone, in keeping with the meeting's rule against monuments, and her name survived because Norman insisted on writing it in his own hand at the front of the household account book. Amos was nine and Mary was seven, and Norman raised them alone. Her legacy is easy to underrate. Amos grew into a steady man who lived until 1788, and Mary grew into a slayer and died in 1750, and both carried some part of their mother's practicality. The rivalry between the Faulkners and the Proctors seldom touched Susan directly, though a Proctor in-law in a Quaker settlement could not have been wholly ignorant of the story of the Guest at Towton. What the families remember is that the White Ledger's Pennsylvania hunters fought better dressed, better fed and better concealed because of the woman who kept the seams. In the Slayerverse she stands as one of the unarmed founders of a hunting household, someone who never fired a shot and whose needle, all the same, shaped the way a generation of the family went into the dark.