Benjamin Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Long Latch. Craft: Ledger Recall.

Benjamin Proctor was born in 1735 at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and spent most of his working life on horseback, riding a circuit of Shenandoah Valley meetinghouses with a Bible in one saddlebag and a long rifle in the other. He was a vampire slayer of the Proctor White Ledger line, called in 1761 and known in the ledger as The Long Latch, a spy by temperament whose craft, Ledger Recall, let him carry whole columns of tallies in his head. He married Isobel Thorne in 1754, raised two daughters, and died in 1804 of a wasting illness at sixty-nine, the same year as his wife. His father, Levi Wilder, born in 1708, was a wheelwright, and Benjamin's earliest memories were of felloes steaming in a bending frame, iron tyres shrinking onto oak in a shower of sparks, and the tight economy of a man who built wheels for planters' carts and could tell from the sound of a hub whether its owner drove carefully. His mother, Rachel Proctor, born in 1712, was the Proctor by blood in the household, and it was through her that the White Ledger's obligations came to the boy. She was the sort of farmer's wife who moved the whole family down the valley road when the price of land in the tidewater grew too high, hauling furniture and children in three wagons to the limestone country of the Shenandoah. Fredericksburg gave way to fields of wheat and hemp under the Blue Ridge, a town of stone barns and Presbyterian and Lutheran meetinghouses served by traveling ministers. The family that arrived in the valley included two younger siblings. Phebe Wilder Proctor, born in 1741, never felt the calling and grew up to keep the accounts of half the family's business, being the only one of the three who could add a column of shillings without error. Jonas Proctor, born in 1743, became a slayer in his own right and a steady companion to his elder brother on the road. Benjamin, meanwhile, was educated at a country school and then by the itinerant clergy, who found him bright, devout and a dangerously good listener. By his late teens he had decided on the ministry, and he was licensed to preach among the dissenting congregations that were then multiplying in the back country. The circuit preacher's life fitted his other work better than either would have fitted alone. A man who visits forty households in a season, sleeps in strangers' lofts and buries the dead from Winchester to the Roanoke sees a great deal. Benjamin heard confessions that were not confessions, noted which families lost their sheep in unusual patterns, and learned which sextons could be trusted with a spade and a silence. His alias was earned in this work. He was The Long Latch because doors opened for him, in the sense that a preacher is admitted to every house, and because he had a habit of quietly lifting latches to see what lay behind them. His archetype in the family's terms was that of the Spy: not a fighter but a gatherer, the hunter who reads the district and hands the pieces to the others. His calling came in 1761, after a winter fever that took everyone in a household except one. He had been sent for to bury a farm family at the head of a hollow, and found six dead in three days and a small boy alive and mute in the corner of the loft. He conducted the funeral, wrote the names in his little book, and then asked the boy, gently, what he had seen. The answer, when it eventually came, was not about the fever at all. Benjamin sat on a barrel in the cold with a rifle he had borrowed and waited, and what came for the boy came in the small hours and did not survive the morning. He rode away with the child in front of his saddle and a fixed understanding of his own work. His craft, Ledger Recall, developed from that beginning. The White Ledger of the Proctor house was a written tally, but a written tally could be lost, stolen or read by the wrong eyes, and a man on the road could not always carry a book. Benjamin taught himself to hold entries in his head as a preacher holds scripture, by rhythm and association, a name attached to a hymn, a date to a psalm number. He could recite forty years of the ledger's vampire tallies for the western counties without notes, and he corrected clerks in three states who had copied a figure wrong. His long rifle and silver-cast shot were kept clean and rarely fired, for the Spy's job was to know where the fight would be and to arrive just before it. In 1754, seven years before his calling, he had married Isobel Thorne, who was twenty-three to his nineteen. She belonged to the House of Thorne, the Northumbrian border reivers turned mountain hunters, though she herself was a milliner, working from a shop room off the main street with a window full of bonnets and ribbons that the wives of planters and preachers alike came to inspect. Their courtship was conducted largely through fittings and sermons. The Thorne relations approved of the match for reasons of their own, and the Proctors were pleased to gain a house whose skill with mountain terrain was unmatched. Isobel never carried a rifle, but she was the only person to whom Benjamin told the whole of what he did, and she kept his secrets with the discretion of a woman who spent her days hearing everybody else's. Two daughters came of the marriage. Rachel Thorne Proctor was born in 1755 and died in 1801, and Deborah Proctor was born in 1759 and died in 1806. Neither became a slayer, and Benjamin, who had feared for them, was quietly relieved. They grew up in a household of sermons and ledgers, where visitors arrived at odd hours and where their father could recite pages of figures at the table and then ask for the salt. Both married locally and kept up the household's contacts among the valley congregations. Their mother's shop remained a meeting place for information that no one would have entrusted to a letter. The Revolution moved through the valley as recruiting, requisitions and rumour, and Benjamin's circuit carried him among Loyalists and patriots alike. He preached peace and passed along warnings. In matters of the White Ledger he was a gentle rival of the Faulkners, exchanging polite letters with the Massachusetts branch, sending congratulations on a good tally and asking pointed questions about the Guest of Towton that were never answered to his satisfaction. In his last years a wasting illness thinned him until he could no longer sit a horse. Isobel nursed him and then died, in the same year, 1804, a few months before him. He followed at sixty-nine. In the Slayerverse the Long Latch is remembered as the preacher who kept the White Ledger in his head, and as proof that a slayer's craft could be a memory and a good listening ear as much as a rifle.