Emma Proctor

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Plain Furrow. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

Emma Proctor was born in 1876 at Seguin, Texas, and lived seventy-four years as a nurse and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, most of them in the old town of San Antonio between the infirmary, the river and the military posts. The family book knows her as The Plain Furrow, a name that recalls a line cut straight and without ornament through hard ground, and it classes her as a Broker, a hunter who works by bargains, terms and conditions, who deals where the others fight and who can make a creature sign its own undoing. Her craft was Procedural Trapping, the use of rules, forms, hours and proper procedure to catch what force could not, and her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was the elder daughter of the bookkeeper William Kimbrough Proctor and of the shopkeeper Emma Guenther, and the sister of Frederick Proctor, who was not a hunter. She did not marry. She died in 1950 of heart failure, aged seventy-four, having kept a ward, a rulebook and a grudge against the dark for fifty-two years. She was born at Seguin because her grandmother's people were there. The Kimbroughs had a farm outside the town on the Guadalupe, and in the spring of 1876 her mother, Emma Guenther, who kept a shop on Soledad Street and would not shut it for anything short of an emergency, took the stage up with her mother-in-law, Fanny Kimbrough, and was delivered of a daughter in the front room of the farmhouse, in the same bed in which her husband had been born twenty-three years before. She was back at the counter in ten days, with the baby in a basket under the cloth. The infant was fair, long-legged and unnaturally quiet, and a German customer, who examined her across the dress goods, declared that she had the look of a child who had already decided to refuse something. It was taken as a compliment. She grew up in the rooms over a shop, in a household of German and English, of sausage and ledgers, and she was a child who watched things. She watched the customers come and go. She watched the drovers lean on the counter and talk in low voices to her mother. She watched her father, who did the books in the evening under a green lamp, and she learned, without being taught, that every rule has a reason and that the reason is usually a person. At nine she sat in on a lesson in double entry taught by her grandmother, Fanny, at the kitchen table, and pointed out an error. Fanny said that it was the first time in her long teaching that a child had found a mistake in an exercise that she had set on purpose. Her father, when told, took off his spectacles and said that he hoped the child would go into a respectable profession. She said that she would go into nursing, which was nearly the same thing. She trained on the wards of the Santa Rosa Infirmary, in the old stone building on Houston Street, where the Sisters of Charity took young women who could read, who did not faint and who could stand on their feet for fourteen hours. She was eighteen. She learned the rules of the ward, which were many. There were rules for visiting hours, for the signing of the register at the door, for the admission of strangers, for the handling of the dead and for the order in which a sick room must be entered and left. The Sisters were very exact about them. She learned to apply a poultice, to lift a patient, to keep a chart and to tell a night nurse from a fool. She also learned, by means of a good deal of quiet observation, that a rule, exactly observed, is a fence, and that there are things in the world that cannot climb it. The calling came in the winter of 1898, after a fever that took a whole household. She was twenty-two, a probationer in her last year, and she was sent, with a senior sister who fell ill on the second day, to a house on the edge of King William, where a German merchant's family of seven had taken sick in a week. She nursed them. She sat up with them in shifts, for eleven days, with a basin, a lamp and a bottle of carbolic, and the only survivor, at the end, was the youngest, a girl of nine, who lay in the back bedroom looking at the wall and would not say a word. The rest were buried in the same week. Emma sat with the child through the last night of the fever, and in the small hours the child told her, in a voice that was very small and very clear, that the gentleman who had come to see her father every evening had always waited at the gate until he was asked in. She did not go to the priest, or to the doctor, or to the police. She went to her uncle, Frederick Kimbrough Proctor, at his case in the newspaper office, and told him what the child had said. He listened to the whole of it, sealed a statement with a round of wax, and said that she had found in a fortnight what he had taken a month to find at thirty-three. But he was a detective, and what she brought him was not a question of witness. It was a question of rules. She had noticed that the gentleman had come every night to the house at the same hour, that he had never crossed the threshold until the door was opened to him and that, on the evening that he had not been asked in, he had waited at the gate for a full hour, until he went away. A thing that must be invited is a thing that can be governed by an invitation. She said it was the simplest matter in the world. All one needed was a set of forms. Broker is the ledger's word for a hunter who does not chase. She did not go out at night with a lantern. She worked in the ward, in the register at the door and in the ordinary apparatus of a city's rules, and she made the apparatus do the work. She arranged a quarantine notice that would compel a particular house to be shut and its doors barred for fourteen days, and that would bring to its gate, on a bitter night, a man who could not be seen to decline a doctor's summons. She drafted a visitors' roll that required each visitor to be signed in by name and by the person who received him, and then saw to it that a name which could not be written, or which would not be given, found the door closed. She proposed a rule, at the infirmary, that no person be admitted to the isolation ward after dusk without the signature of two sisters. It was adopted without a division. The Sisters, who were practical women, did not ask why, and said only that it was a very sensible regulation. The name of the Plain Furrow came from the manner of the work. There was nothing in it that shone. She was not a fighter and never carried her pistol in a holster, but in the deep pocket of a nurse's apron, where it was mistaken, by the doctors, for a bottle of tonic. She took some eighteen creatures in thirty years, most of them by means of a form, and she never told the same trick twice. Her sole fault, the family agreed, was a tendency to correct the language of the people that she had caught. She was, in any case, a large favourite with the Sisters, who once, in 1904, unanimously resolved that the irregular hours of Miss Proctor were to be overlooked as a matter of hospital policy. The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900 sent her down the line on a relief train, at twenty-four, in a cap and apron, with a case of dressings and a list. She spent a week in the temporary wards of the wreck, nursing survivors on the floor of a cotton warehouse, and she said afterwards that the only thing that had kept the place from being a horror was that somebody had written the rules on a blackboard at the door. The Great War took her to the base hospital at Camp Travis, where she was a nurse in a long ward of soldiers, and the influenza of 1918 filled it to the roof. She worked for eighty-one days and slept in her uniform, and noticed, in the second week, that a patient on the end bed had been visited by a man who had not signed the book. The man was not seen again. She wrote the matter up in the ward log in one line, in the passive voice. She retired in 1946, at seventy, to two rooms on the river side of the old town, which her brother Frederick had taken for her before his death. Her nephew and her nieces in the wider family called on her on Sundays. She died in the spring of 1950, of heart failure, aged seventy-four, in her own chair by the window, with a copy of the hospital rules open on her lap at the page for night admissions. The Sisters of the infirmary sent a wreath, and a card on which was written, in a formal hand, that the matter had been signed and was closed. Emma Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse who caught the dark with a register, the Plain Furrow who made the rules of a ward do what a rifle could not. In the Slayerverse she stands for the brokers of the White Ledger, the hunters who bargained, regulated and drafted, who knew that a door needs an invitation and a form needs a signature, and who turned the dullest paper in the world into a trap.