Deborah Proctor

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

Deborah Proctor never married, and in a country where that was regarded as a misfortune she treated it as a matter of business. Born in 1759 at Winchester, Virginia, the younger daughter of the circuit preacher Benjamin Proctor and the milliner Isobel Thorne, she was a member of the Yorkist house that kept the White Ledger, and a descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. She had no husband and no children, and the ledgers, which had no heading for a woman who ran a farm on her own account, filed her among the farmers' wives. She died in 1806, at forty-seven, of the sweating sickness. Winchester was then the most important town in the lower Shenandoah, a market and county seat at the north end of the Valley, at the head of the great wagon road, with a stone courthouse, a Presbyterian meeting house, tanneries, gunsmiths and a busy weekly market. It stood close to the frontier during the French and Indian War, and in her infancy the young Colonel Washington was building Fort Loudoun on the edge of town, so that the streets were full of militia, contractors and camp followers. Deborah's earliest memories were of drums, wagon dust and the smell of woodsmoke and horses. Her father, Benjamin Proctor, who was known to the White Ledger as The Long Latch, spent much of the year on his preaching circuit. Her mother ran a millinery from the front room, trimming bonnets and caps with ribbon carried up from Philadelphia by wagon, and the two of them raised Deborah and her sister Rachel Thorne Proctor, born in 1755, four years her senior, in a household with a good deal of talk and very little spare cash. She was, by every account, a sharper-tongued girl than her sister. Rachel was steady and warm, and Deborah was quick and dry, given to remarks that had to be thought about for a moment before they landed. She learned to read and to reckon at home, and to write a good letter, and she showed early an interest that the family found unexpected: she liked land. She liked to walk out with her father when he was home, to look at a field and be told by him what the limestone underneath it meant for the water, and she liked to ask a farmer what he paid for lime and what he got for wheat. The valley's farms, with their deep limestone soils, their springs, and their great stone barns, fascinated her far more than the hatband and ribbon trade. The Revolution came when she was sixteen. The Valley sent its riflemen to Boston in 1775, marching over six hundred miles in three weeks, and Winchester became a depot, a hospital and, later, a prison camp for Hessian and British captives from Saratoga. Deborah watched it all and took her own quiet lessons from it: that a farm which could feed an army was worth more than any amount of paper, and that a woman with a store of grain and a sound cellar was in a stronger position than most of the men around her. She worked through the war in her mother's shop and her sister's household, and she saved. In her early twenties, when her sister had already married and her friends were being courted, Deborah made a decision that put her out of step with the neighbourhood. She had inherited a small sum from an aunt of the Thorne side, and she used it, together with her savings, to take a lease on a limestone farm of perhaps ninety acres a few miles outside town, with a stone house, a spring, a good barn and a stand of hickory. She hired a farm hand and a woman for the dairy. She sowed wheat and rye, kept a small flock of sheep and a few cows, and drove her grain to the Winchester mill in her own wagon. She was, in everything but law and title, a farmer, and the neighbours, having no better word, called her Mistress Proctor of the stone house. The ledger clerks, who wanted to categorise everyone, put her down as a farmer's wife because that was the category for the women of such holdings, though there was no farmer other than herself. She was no fool about the dangers of her situation. A woman alone on a farm outside town, in the years after the war, when the roads were full of discharged soldiers and vagrants, took precautions. She kept a good dog, a long gun and a barred door, and she learned from her father, on his visits, what to watch for. The Proctor ledger, which tallied vampires taken by the Yorkist side, had entries in that country, and Deborah's farm lay along one of the wagon roads its hunters used. She did not hunt. But her barn was a resting place for the family's men, her spring water was clean, and her cellar had a good lock. Her father, when he passed through, would sleep in her loft and leave a mark on the doorpost, and she would leave a jar of cider on the step. She kept up her friendship with her sister, and became a devoted aunt to Rachel's sons, Jonathan Cooke Proctor and John Cooke. It was Deborah who, after her sister's death in 1801, took up the correspondence with the family's other branches, and it was Deborah who received the news of the death of her parents, both in 1804, and buried them. She was now the last of that household. She had never cared much for the old quarrel with the Faulkners, whom she regarded as fellow farmers who happened to be on the other side, but she kept up the White Ledger's honour and took a quiet pride in its numbers. In 1806 the sweating sickness reached the valley again. Deborah, forty-seven, took it in the late summer, and died of it within the week. She left the lease to a nephew, and the tools, the seed grain and the long gun to the household of her sister's family. In the Slayerverse, Deborah Proctor is remembered as the woman who did not marry and did not need to, a farmer of the Shenandoah limestone whose barn was always open to the White Ledger's men.