Harriet Brewster

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

Harriet Brewster was born in 1845 at Harrisonburg, Virginia, and lived twenty-seven years as a seamstress and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Hard Drover, a name taken from the way she drove a bargain and the quarry that went with it, and it classes her as a Broker, a hunter who works through terms, favours and obligations rather than through the chase. Her craft was Procedural Trapping, the building of a case, step by step, in which every move closes one exit. She was the elder child of the blacksmith and slayer Samuel Proctor Brewster, The Lone Scythe, and of the laundress Cora Mather, she never married and had no children, and she died in 1872 of exposure on a winter watch, aged twenty-seven, six years after her father. Her brother was the printer Henry Brewster. She carried a revolver and silver-cast shot, and she took her first quarry in the valley towns of Virginia, in the hard years after the Civil War. She was born at Harrisonburg and not at Harpers Ferry, where her father had his forge, because her mother went up the valley for the confinement. Cora Mather had been a Harrisonburg girl before her family moved down to the armoury town, and an aunt of hers still kept a two-room house on the edge of the courthouse town, with a bed that had seen four births and a stove that never went out. Cora went up in the last week of February on a wagon, with a bundle of linen and a good deal of advice from her mother-in-law, and the child arrived in the aunt's back room during a thaw, with the eaves dripping and the aunt reading aloud from the almanac to keep everybody calm. Samuel came up the pike two days later, and stood in the doorway with his hat in both hands. Harpers Ferry was the town she grew up in. It stood under its cliff at the meeting of the Potomac and the Shenandoah, all stairs and stone and river noise, and a child raised there learned early that everything in the place was for sale or for hire. Her grandmother's boarding house fed forty men at a sitting. Her mother's laundry ran through the armoury's shirts. Her father's forge made the hinges and horseshoes that the valley wanted and, in a small way, other things that it did not talk about. She ran errands between the three, with a slate and a basket, and learned what each of them cost. At seven she could give change faster than the clerk at the store. At ten she had worked out, without anyone telling her, that the price of a thing was less often the figure marked on it than the favour owed behind it. She took to the needle by fourteen, which was the usual age and the usual trade for a girl with small, quick, patient hands. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker on Shenandoah Street, who had a low opinion of girls in general and a high one of Harriet in particular, and within two years she was doing the plain sewing for half the town: shirts, aprons, children's frocks, the long grey dresses that the Brethren of the valley wore. She also learned to sit at a window with her work in her lap and watch the street, which a seamstress does without anyone noticing. By sixteen she knew who was courting whom, who was in debt to whom and who had been seen going into the tavern by the back door. The war came down the valley when she was sixteen, and did not leave. Harpers Ferry changed hands again and again, the armoury burned, and the rooms above the forge were lost and found and lost. Her father shod cavalry horses for both sides, her mother washed for both armies, and Harriet sewed: shirts from captured cloth, tents, the coats of wounded men who could not pay. She watched soldiers trade with civilians, and civilians with soldiers, and drew a conclusion that she used for the rest of her short life, which was that in a place where nobody can be trusted the person who holds the terms is the person who is safe. Her father was killed in October 1866, when the forge was set alight to draw him out. She was twenty-one, and she stood in the ashes at dawn with her mother and her brother, and found, in the ruins of the shop, nothing she could use. She said afterwards that she had known, standing there, what she was going to do. It was the way her father had died that decided her. He had been a listener, who heard what people left out, and he had been killed by a thing that had waited for him to listen. A quarry that could set a fire to draw a hunter out was a quarry that understood the hunter's habits. She resolved that the next hunter to go after it would be one whose habits it could not learn, because they would be built out of other people's. The calling itself came in the autumn of 1868, in an inn yard. She had gone down the pike to a village south of Winchester with a bundle of finished curtains for the innkeeper's wife, and was sitting on the mounting block in the yard at dusk, waiting to be paid, when a man in a good coat came in off the road and asked for lodging. The landlord, who was a fat, easy fellow, said that there was a room. The guest thanked him and did not come in. He stood in the yard, a foot short of the sill, with his hat in his hand, and went on talking, pleasantly, about the weather, the price of feed and the state of the road, and he did not cross the threshold. Harriet, who had spent twenty years listening to terms, understood all at once that the man was waiting to be asked. He wanted the landlord to say it in so many words, and he wanted it said in the right form. She heard the landlord begin, and she put down the curtains and said in a clear voice that the gentleman would have to wait, because the room had not yet been let. Then she went on talking to him, politely, for an hour, about the terms of the lodging, the hour of supper, the charge for the stabling and the rule of the house that all guests must sign the book before they could be received. She did not know what she was doing. She knew only that each question she asked, and each form she insisted upon, took away one of the ways by which he might have been admitted, and that by the time the moon rose she had closed every door of the house but one. The guest was a patient creature, and it stood in the yard through the whole of the conversation, growing colder and stiller and more angry, until the lamp in the window burned out and the first grey came up over the barn. It went over the wall with the light. The landlord, when he had been told, sat down on the mounting block and took a drink straight from the jug. Harriet went home and wrote the whole thing out in a school exercise book, from memory, in order, and found when she had done that she had described, without knowing it, a craft. It was the building of a case in which the quarry's own rules are the bars. She took the book to Harpers Ferry, to her father's cousins, who kept the White Ledger in the valley, and put it in front of them, and they read it through twice and then sent for an old pilot on the canal who had been a hunter for forty years. He said that it was a craft he had heard of and never seen done, and that the ledger called it Procedural Trapping. There were not many of them, he said, and most of the ones who had tried it were dead. He gave her a revolver and a bag of silver-cast shot. She worked in the valley towns for four years. She took her orders for sewing as a cover, and went about with a basket and a tape measure, and in the course of it she found out who in any village was owed a favour by whom. A dressmaker hears the whole ledger of a town. She traded in it. She would learn that a miller owed a debt of honour to a man who had been seen in the wrong place, and she would go to the miller and say that the debt might be discharged, in a small way, by an evening's watch on a particular road. She drove the bargains hard. The valley gave her the name of The Hard Drover for the way she herded a difficult neighbour into doing what was needed, and then herded the quarry into the closed yard that the neighbours had built for it. She took nine vampires in four years, each of them by a procedure, and never once by surprise. She died in January 1872, of exposure, on a winter watch. There was a thing in the mill country above the town that she had been building a case against for eleven weeks, and the last step was a night in a cold loft, over a ford, with a lantern shuttered and a rope in her hand, waiting for the quarry to keep an appointment she had arranged for it. A snow came in out of the north. She did not leave her post. She had bargained her whole life with things that kept to their terms, and she kept to her own. The quarry did not come. They found her at dawn in the loft, sitting upright, with her back against a beam and the rope coiled in her lap, and the white ledger of her town's debts in her coat. She was twenty-seven. She was buried beside her father, in the churchyard above the river, and her brother set the stone. Harriet Brewster is remembered in the Proctor family as The Hard Drover, the seamstress who held the threshold and closed the doors one by one. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Brokers of the White Ledger, the slayers who understood that the dark keeps rules, and who beat it, when they could, by insisting on every one.