Deborah Proctor Brewster

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Deborah Proctor Brewster was born in 1819 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, at Harpers Ferry, and worked for twenty-five years as a laundress in the town at the meeting of the rivers. She was the daughter of the riverboat pilot Jonathan Brewster and the boarding-house keeper Deborah Proctor Bowen, and the younger sister of the slayer Samuel Proctor Brewster. She never married. She was not a hunter, and she lived at the back of a boarding house on a hillside, but she was, for a quarter of a century, the keeper of the clean linen of the whole riverfront, and the White Ledger's cousins said that there was no laundry in Virginia that was so well read. She died in 1862 of a long illness, at forty-three, in the third winter of a war that had burned her town to the foundations, and was buried in the churchyard above the river, beside her father. Her father, Jonathan Brewster, born at Staunton in 1790 and dead in 1849, was a pilot on the Shenandoah and the Potomac, a courteous man who never passed a boat in trouble without throwing a line. Her mother, Deborah Proctor Bowen, born in 1789 and dead in 1867, kept the boarding house at Harpers Ferry where the family lived, and was known as a woman who could produce a hot dinner for sixty on an hour's notice. She was born four years after her brother Samuel, in a room at the top of the house, on a morning in the spring when the Shenandoah was in full flood and the lower street was under two feet of water. Her mother, who had sent the lodgers out to the higher ground, delivered her with the help of a neighbour, and then went down to see to the stove. She was a small, fair, rather silent girl, who grew up under her mother's eye and her brother's shadow, and who was never quite sure of her place. Samuel, who was the eldest and the son, was the clever one, the one who read. She was the one who helped. She stood on a box at the kitchen table at five, peeling potatoes, and at seven she was in the laundry, a long, hot, wet room at the back of the house, with four great coppers and a wooden mangle, where her mother's maids did the lodgers' washing. She was put to the rinsing tubs. She liked it. She liked the steam and the smell of lye soap, the long lines of white sheets in the yard and the rhythm of the work, which had a beginning, a middle and an end, and in which one could see at the close of the day what one had done. It was in the laundry that she learned the thing that made her useful to the Ledger. A laundress, as her grandmother Hannah Cutler Proctor had taught her mother, and her mother had taught her, is a reader. She reads the cloth. She knows from a shirt what its owner has done, from a sheet how he has slept and from a handkerchief how he has felt. She knows the blood from the wine, the grass from the mud and the fever sweat from the night sweat, and she knows, too, a number of less common stains: the green of a grave, the grey of old ash, the brown of a thing that was not blood but had a good deal in common with it. Deborah, who had been taught since infancy to look, noticed. By eleven she could tell, from the state of the linen in a boarder's room, whether he had been out at night. By thirteen she could say what he had been doing. Her mother, who had been told by the Proctor cousins that the laundry would one day be useful, let her get on with it. She did not tell her daughter why. She simply put her in charge, at fourteen, of the lodgers' linen, and arranged that any sheet that came back from a room with a marked stain was put by, for her inspection. It was an unspoken system. The girl, who was fond of rules, took to it at once. She kept a row of neatly labelled bundles, on a shelf in the drying loft, each with a date, a room and a number, and in the course of a year she had formed a clear idea of what kind of lodgers passed through the house, and which of them ought to be watched. Her brother Samuel, who became a hunter, used the loft as an office. He was a blacksmith and a detective, and he sat in a corner with his notebook, in the evenings, and asked questions. She would bring a bundle down, without a word, and lay it on the table. He would look at it. He would say what he thought, and she would say what she thought, and they would put the two together. It was a collaboration that neither of them had planned, and it worked very well. He said, later in life, that his sister's eyes had caught more of the Ledger's quarry than his own. She never told anyone what she did. She did not consider it a skill, or a service, or anything but the ordinary business of a laundress, and she would have been surprised to hear that it had a name. She was a shy, plain, quiet woman, in a grey apron, who went about the town with a basket on her hip, and was known to everyone. She was said to be the only person in Harpers Ferry who had never been seen to be angry. She took in the armoury workers' washing, the canal men's, the railway clerks', the inn's and the doctor's, and by twenty-five she had the largest business on the Potomac side of the town. She took it to a second building. She hired women, six of them, who came in at dawn and worked until dusk. She kept the books herself. She was a fair employer, who paid on the day and did not scold, and her girls, who were mostly the daughters of armoury men, were devoted to her. The laundry was in its day a centre of the town's life. Its coppers were the best place in Harpers Ferry to hear the news, and it was said, only half in jest, that nothing had ever happened in the town that had not been discussed in Deborah Brewster's drying yard before the following noon. The laundry took a very great part in the affair of 1859. On the night of the sixteenth of October, when John Brown's little band of raiders took the armoury, the bridge and the railway, and the townspeople woke to the sound of shots, she was in her mother's house at the top of the hill, with her mother, her brother's family and a number of frightened lodgers. On the evening of the eighteenth, after the marines had stormed the engine house and the raiders were taken, she went down to the armoury with a cart and a dozen women and set up a tub in the yard, and washed the wounded. She was forty. She worked for six hours, in the cold, without a pause, in a yard lit by lanterns, and the men on the stretchers looked up at her, out of their bandages, and said nothing. The war did not spare the town. Harpers Ferry, which lay at the junction of the Shenandoah and the Potomac, on the road between the armies, was occupied, abandoned, bombarded and retaken a dozen times. The armoury was burned by the Union garrison in the first weeks. The bridge was blown up. The boarding house was hit by a shell. Deborah, who had no quarrel with either side, went on washing. She washed for the Union pickets and for the Confederate cavalry, in a borrowed kitchen, in the bombed-out town, and she did not ask whose shirts they were. She had been ill for some time. It began in 1858, with a cough, and then a fever in the evenings, and then a thinness, and though she consulted three doctors and took every remedy, her mother's and her brother's and the herbalists', nothing helped. The Ledger's family said that it was a lung complaint. She worked on, though she could hardly stand, and did not tell anyone how bad it was. She gave up the laundry in the autumn of 1861, and went to bed. She lay in the room at the top of the house in which she had been born, and looked out over the roofs, and listened to the guns. Her brother Samuel, who came every evening, sat by her, and read to her from the notebooks. She asked to hear the bundles, as she called them, the old cases, and he read them to her, one by one, and she, from the bed, corrected the dates. It was the last work that she did. She died in the winter of 1862, at forty-three, in the room where she had been born, with her mother at the foot of the bed. She was buried in the churchyard, beside her father, under a stone that her brother cut himself, with a single line: She knew what was in the wash. Deborah Proctor Brewster is remembered in the Proctor family as the laundress of Harpers Ferry, the quiet sister who read the linen. In the Slayerverse she stands for the laundresses of the White Ledger, the women who washed the clothes of a town and knew, from the marks they left, where the dark had been.