Isobel Thorne

Spouse of Benjamin Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from the House of Thorne.

Isobel Thorne was born in 1731 at Fredericksburg, Virginia, a young tobacco and trading town on the falls of the Rappahannock that had been laid out only a few years earlier and still smelled of new-sawn planks. Her father was Wat Thorne, born in 1706, a blacksmith and, in the private accounting of the border families, a vampire slayer known as the Winter Otter. The dossier of the family gives no mother for her, and the old Thorne stories say only that the girl was raised by her father and by the rough, warm society of a forge yard, where a child learned early to keep clear of hot iron and to answer a stranger civilly. The House of Thorne, from which she came, had a long history to look back on: Northumbrian border reivers of the marches between England and Scotland, families who had ridden, herded, feuded and hunted across the moors for centuries, and who had come over the Atlantic and down the Appalachian valleys to become, in time, mountain hunters. Fredericksburg in the 1730s and 1740s was a place of hogsheads and wagons. Planters brought their tobacco down to the river warehouses to be inspected and shipped, wagons came in from the Shenandoah Valley loaded with flour and hides, and taverns and stores multiplied along the streets. It was a Church of England colony, with vestries, glebe lands and Sunday attendance at the parish church expected of the respectable, though the Scots-Irish and German settlers who were beginning to fill the valleys to the west brought Presbyterians, Lutherans and a wide variety of plain-spoken dissent. Wat Thorne's forge stood near the wagon road, and business was brisk. He shod horses, mended wheels and made axes and hoes, and, on certain nights, he took his rifle and went out. Isobel grew up with an understanding of what that meant that never needed to be put into words. Wat taught her what a father could. She learned to read and reckon, to keep his forge accounts, and to recognise the signs that the Thorne family looked for in a district where something was wrong: cattle spooked in a still field, dogs refusing a particular lane, a well that turned foul without cause. She learned to hold her tongue with strangers and to be quick with her eyes. She was a small, dark, straight-backed girl with strong hands, clever with a needle and better with money than most boys her age. Her father had hoped for a son to carry on the hunting, and he got instead a daughter who carried on the observing, a role that proved to be at least as useful. Her trade, when she came to it, was millinery. She was apprenticed as a girl to a Fredericksburg milliner, a woman of French descent who had come from Williamsburg with a reputation for good taste, and she learned to trim hats and bonnets, to make caps and aprons, to work silk, straw and linen, and to run a small shop. It was a good trade for a girl without a fortune. The wives of planters and merchants paid well for a fashionable hat, and a milliner heard everything, from marriage arrangements to gossip about who had been seen on the road at midnight. Isobel, who could sew a straight seam and keep a straight face, listened and remembered. It was through the wagon trade that she met Benjamin Proctor. He was born in 1735, four years her junior, a circuit preacher of the Proctor line who rode the backcountry between the Blue Ridge and the tidewater on a lean brown horse, preaching in barns, courthouses and under trees to congregations of farmers who had no minister of their own. He was also a vampire slayer, and his saddlebags held, alongside a Bible and a hymnbook, a long knife, a flask of holy water and a small pouch of silver. When he first came to the forge to have his horse shod, Wat Thorne took one look at the pouch and the hands that held it, and the two men understood each other without a word. Wat asked him to stay to supper. Isobel, serving the table, learned within an hour that the young preacher was a Proctor, one of the White Ledger family, and she noted with amusement that her father treated him with the courteous wariness of a man meeting a member of a rival club. They married in 1754, when she was twenty-three and he nineteen, a difference of years that the neighbours remarked on and neither of them minded. It was a union of two hunting families, a Thorne from the border country and a Proctor of the Yorkist ledger, and the wedding was held at Fredericksburg with a Church of England parson, an arrangement that Benjamin's dissenting brethren found faintly scandalous. Wat Thorne gave the bride a set of small tools for her trade and the groom a good knife, and told the pair, gruffly, to look after each other. It was a family alliance, and it drew the White Ledger and the border hunters of the Thorne line into a closer connection than either had had before. Life with a circuit preacher was hard on a household. Benjamin was away for weeks at a time, riding round a circuit that took in scattered meetinghouses across a hundred miles of hills, and Isobel ran the home in his absence. They settled in the Shenandoah Valley, among the wagon roads and limestone farms of the great valley, where German and Scots-Irish settlers were clearing land and building barns. She opened a millinery of her own in a small valley town, sold caps, bonnets and ribbons to the farm wives, and kept the household accounts with a precision that would have shamed a Philadelphia merchant. Her father Wat Thorne, the Winter Otter, died in 1750, four years before the wedding, and she had no family left but her husband. Two daughters were born to the pair. Rachel Thorne Proctor, born in 1755, was a serious, tall girl with her mother's dark eyes, and Deborah Proctor, born in 1759, was a livelier and more impulsive child. Neither of them became a slayer, and Isobel raised them in the millinery, teaching them to sew, to keep books and to read a customer's mood. She was a fond, exacting, unsentimental mother. The wars with France on the frontier had rolled through the valley in her twenties, with settlers fleeing eastward after Braddock's defeat, and she had sheltered refugees in her own house, so she knew what danger was. During the Revolution she sold caps and mended coats for the Virginia militia and quietly kept the White Ledger's Shenandoah correspondence in her sewing box, under a layer of ribbon. Benjamin's road took him through the whole of the Revolution and beyond, preaching, hunting and coming home. Isobel took his news, his wounds and his dirty linen with equal composure. She outlived her daughters' childhood and lived on into a widowhood that lasted, in the end, barely a season. Her elder daughter Rachel died in 1801, and Deborah in 1806, though Isobel did not live to see the second loss. She died in 1804, in the depth of winter, of a cough she could not shake, aged seventy-three, and Benjamin, worn out, died in the same year. The White Ledger carries no tally in her name, since she was never a hunter. But the Proctors of the Shenandoah noted her place in their own memory as the Thorne who married in and brought a hunter's eye with her. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the milliner of the valley, the daughter of the Winter Otter, whose quiet steadiness kept a travelling household together.