Cora Mather

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

Cora Mather was born in 1820 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and worked for forty years as a laundress in the valley towns, most of them at Harpers Ferry. She married the blacksmith and vampire slayer Samuel Proctor Brewster, known as The Lone Scythe, in 1842, raised two children, Harriet Brewster and Henry Brewster, the first of whom became a slayer, buried her husband in 1866 and lived on in the ruined town for seventeen years more. She died in 1883 of pneumonia, at sixty-three. She was not a hunter and was not born to the White Ledger, but she is remembered in the Proctor family as the woman who made a blacksmith's forge a home, who kept the accounts while he kept the tallies, and who took the vow that a good many wives of the Ledger took, in one form or another: to ask him nothing, and to be there when he came back. Harrisonburg, in the year of her birth, was a small, clean, prosperous Shenandoah Valley town, the seat of Rockingham County, built around a courthouse square in the middle of some of the richest farmland in Virginia. It had a red-brick court, a dozen stores, several taverns and four churches, and it lay in a broad, green, rolling country of wheat fields, orchards and limestone barns, under the long blue line of the Massanutten. Her father, a wagoner, whose name the family papers do not give, hauled flour and whiskey to the river landings. Her mother, a stout, quick-tongued woman, took in washing. The family lived in a two-room house on the edge of the town, and Cora, the third of five children, was set to the tubs at six. She was a square, strong, black-haired child with a wide face and a wide mouth, who laughed a great deal and had opinions about everything. She had, from the first, the gift of the good worker, which is to see what needs to be done and to do it without being told. At ten she could run a tub of washing on her own, and at twelve she could iron a shirt. Her mother, who was a stern taskmaster, said that she had never had a girl who could be left alone with a copper and come back to find the work done. It was a compliment that Cora, who was not used to them, never forgot. When she was thirteen, her mother, who had heard that the United States Armory at Harpers Ferry employed some two hundred men and that its workers' washing was in the hands of only a handful of women, moved the family down the valley. They took a cottage on the hillside, a rented place of two rooms, with a yard, and set up a laundry in the back. It was the best decision the family made. The armoury men, who earned good wages and had few women to wash for them, sent over a steady stream of shirts, and within two years the Mathers were doing the washing of a hundred households. Cora, at fifteen, was in charge of the collecting and delivering, which she did with a handcart, going up and down the steep streets of the town, knocking at doors, and returning with a bundle. It was in the course of that work that she came to the boarding house of Mrs Deborah Bowen, a large establishment on the water, which fed forty men three times a day and sent out, every week, a mountain of dirty linen. She delivered it, there, every Monday, and collected it on Thursday, and in time she got to know the family. Mrs Bowen, a formidable woman of forty-five, was a stern mistress, but a fair one, and gave the girl, on her cold mornings, a bowl of soup. The daughter, Deborah, who was a year older, became her friend. And the son, Samuel, a tall, dark, slow-speaking blacksmith of twenty-one, who worked in the forge behind the house, used to look up from the anvil as she went by and say good morning. She said afterward that she did not notice him for two years. It was not that he was not noticeable. He was six feet tall and built like a door. But she was not a girl who noticed people, in the general way, unless they owed her money. It was Deborah who told her, in the course of one of their Thursday conversations in the drying loft, that her brother had asked about her three times in the week. Cora said that she hoped he had not been dissatisfied with the shirts. Deborah said that it was not the shirts. They were married in the spring of 1842. She told him, before she agreed, that she had one condition. She said that she would marry him if he promised never to ask her a question about herself that she did not wish to answer. He said that it was a very hard bargain, for a man of his profession. She said that she was aware of it. She did not say what she meant. He agreed. It was not until some years later that he realised that the bargain had been a mirror, and that she had, in the most economical way possible, offered him the same. She moved into the rooms over the forge. They were two, with a stove, and a window that looked on the river, and she made a home of them. She hung the curtains. She laid the floor. She set up a small laundry, in the lean-to at the back, with a copper and a mangle, and took in the washing of the armoury, and within a year she was running a business that paid more than the forge. She was a good manager. She kept a ledger, in a large, round hand, and a tin box in which she put, every Saturday, a fixed sum. It was a household of the strictest economy, and of the warmest affection. Her husband's work she did not discuss. She knew, in a general way, that he was a hunter of the White Ledger, because his mother, who had been a good deal in the house, had told her so on the day after the wedding, with the same brisk matter-of-factness with which she discussed the price of soap. She took it in. She said that she had supposed it was something. She asked no questions. She kept her side of the bargain, and so did he, and the marriage was as happy a one as the valley knew. What she did, in practice, was to keep the forge and the household in a condition in which he could work. She kept his coat. She kept his supper on the stove. She kept a lantern on the sill. She made up the small leather bag in which he carried his silver shot, and lined the pocket of his revolver holster with oiled cloth. She learned to fill a lamp, and to put it out, and to leave a note on the kitchen shelf saying that she had gone to her mother's, and what time she would be back. She also, without being asked, took on her sister-in-law's work. When Deborah was ill, in 1861, and could no longer read the linen, Cora took the bundles up to the drying loft and went through them herself, and put aside those that looked wrong. It was a matter of common sense, she said. She had been looking at dirty washing since she was six. Their children were born in the first years of the marriage. Harriet Brewster was born in 1845 and lived until 1872, and was called, in her twenties, to be a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. She was a dark, sharp, serious girl, who took after her father, and she was killed in the line of the work, at twenty-seven, six years after him. Henry Brewster was born in 1847 and lived until 1923. He was a cheerful, thickset, fair-haired boy, who took after his mother, and he did not hunt. He kept the forge going for a few years after 1866, then became a printer. The war tore the town apart. She was forty-one when it began. Harpers Ferry, which lay at the crossing of two rivers and three armies, was a scene of almost constant fighting, and her home, her husband's forge and her laundry were all destroyed in turn. The armoury was burned in April 1861. The bridge was blown up. The town changed hands eight times in the four years that followed. She moved, three times, from one set of rooms to another, carrying the children, the copper and the ledger, and each time she set up the laundry again, in a borrowed shed. She washed for the Union army, and she washed for the Confederates. She said afterward that the shirts had been exactly the same. It was her husband's death in 1866 that she could not bear. The forge was set on fire, at night, and he was killed in the ashes. She was beside him. She had no time to cry, for a month, because the forge had to be rebuilt, the children fed and the business kept going. She did it. She gave the ledger, the tin box and the key to her son, and set up a laundry of her own, in a room on the hill, and lived on, in the ruins, in the company of her sister-in-law's memory, her mother-in-law, and a number of dogs. She died in the winter of 1883, at sixty-three, of pneumonia. She had caught a chill, the week before, carrying a basket of washing up the hill, in the rain, and did not see a doctor. She was buried in the Harpers Ferry churchyard, beside her husband, under a stone that her son had cut. It is marked with a scythe, and with a copper washing tub. Cora Mather is remembered in the Proctor family as the laundress who married the blacksmith, the wife who kept the bargain. In the Slayerverse she stands for the wives of the White Ledger who asked nothing, kept the lamp trimmed and were always in the kitchen, with a cup of soup, when the forge fire burned low.