Lorraine Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wild Cairn. Craft: Quiet Confrontation.

Lorraine Proctor was born in 1901 in the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, and lived thirty-four years, the last seven of them as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger and the whole of her working life as the keeper of a boarding house on Alamo Street. The family book knows her as The Wild Cairn, a name from the heap of stones that travellers raise beside a road to mark a place where something happened and that nobody afterward can quite explain, and it classes her as a Spy, a hunter who learns before she acts. Her craft was Quiet Confrontation, the discipline of speaking to a thing in an ordinary voice, at an ordinary distance, until it has said enough, and her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes and a sealed ledger. She was the elder daughter of the cattle drover and slayer Frederick Adams Proctor, The Lone Reeve, who was also her mentor, and of the seamstress Effie Bowie, and the sister of the slayer Evelyn Bowie Proctor. She never married and had no children. She died in 1935 from a blow taken in a churchyard, aged thirty-four, a year before her mother. She was born on the Westside because that was the custom of the house. Her father, Frederick, had been born there himself, in the front room of a Tejano midwife's cottage across the river from his mother's boarding house, on a spring night when every bed on Alamo Street had been taken by a trail outfit that would not move. Twenty-eight years later his wife went to the daughter of the same midwife, a stout, silent, snuff-taking woman who had been in the room on the first occasion and was not impressed by the second. Lorraine was born in the middle of an April thunderstorm, with her father out on a cattle road near Pearsall and a neighbour's boy sent after him on a mule. She was a long, thin, solemn baby. The midwife, who had delivered Frederick, looked at her for a long time and said that she had his way of waiting to be asked. She was carried to the rooms over the saddler's on Commerce Street in a laundry basket, and was put to sleep next to her mother's treadle. She grew up in the sound of a sewing machine, which she said later was the only reliable clock she had ever lived by. Her mother, who made the long coats with the pocket on the left for half the hunters between the Nueces and the Colorado, was a quick, sandy, red-handed woman who spoke little and sewed a great deal, and her father, who was away for weeks on the cattle roads and came home with a small tidy notebook, was a slight, dark man who would sit on the stairs and ask a question and wait. Lorraine learned to wait before she learned to read. At eight she could sit at the end of the Sunday table and say nothing for an hour, and at ten she was said by a visiting cousin to be the only child in Texas who could make a silence last. She had her father's gift. She had also, which her father did not, a dry, observant, lopsided humour that came out when she was alone with her sister Evelyn, a year younger, and could be relied on to make her laugh in church. She was fifteen when the influenza of 1918 filled the house. The boarding house on Alamo Street, which had been Emma Adams's and was now in the keeping of a cousin, took in forty lodgers in a month, and Lorraine, who was sent over to help with the water and the linen, discovered that she liked it. She liked the order of a house, the bells, the lists, the keys on their hooks, the way in which a lodging was a small machine for knowing who was where. She did not go back to the saddler's rooms. By the time she was nineteen she kept the register, and by twenty-five, in 1926, when the cousin retired to the country, she had the lease. A boarding house was an ideal place for the Ledger, being full of travellers, and Lorraine, with the books in her hand, kept the best account in San Antonio of who came, who left, and who ought to have left and did not. Her father had meant her for the work for some years and said nothing, as it was not his habit to ask a question that had only one answer. He taught her at the kitchen table, in the way that his own father had taught him, how to hear what a witness did not say. But Lorraine, who had the gift, found that the craft she wanted was not the one that her father used. She did not want to ask a thing three times. She wanted to ask it once, quietly, and to watch what the thing did with the silence. Frederick, who was an honest man, said that it was a different art and that he could not teach it, and told her to find it for herself. She found it in the spring of 1928, at a ford on the Medina, in the evening. She had gone out to a cousin's ranch with her father's blessing and a basket of linen, and she was walking back along the river at dusk when she came upon a man standing in the shallows at the crossing, a thin, well-dressed traveller in a dark coat, with a valise on the bank. He had been standing in the water, as far as she could tell, for some time. He had not got out. She stopped on the bank at an easy distance, and said good evening, and asked whether he was waiting for someone. He said that he was. She said that it was a bad place to wait, with the river rising, and that he would be more comfortable on dry land. He said that he did not think so. She asked, in the same flat, ordinary voice, why not. He did not answer. She stood and waited. It was a quarter of an hour by her mother's watch, and in that time she said eleven sentences and he said four, and at the end of them she knew what he was. A man who is afraid of the water, as she told her father that evening, stands in it only because he cannot cross the dry land without being asked. She did not take him that night. She was twenty-six, with a pistol in the basket that she had never fired in anger, and she had the sense to know that. She walked home, wrote down every word that had been said, sealed the page in an envelope and took it to her father, who read it, sat for some time, and said that she had called. He took her out the following week and they took the thing together, on the bank, in the morning, with the stakes and the lantern and Frederick's quiet account of what to do when the voice was done. Lorraine took the sealed ledger from his hands, afterward, and began a book of her own. She was twenty-seven. In October of that year her father died in his Dodge at a low-water crossing near Helotes, and she was left with the craft, the pistol and the strong impression that the ford had had her father's name on it all along. For seven years she did the work from the boarding house. It was well suited to Quiet Confrontation. A woman who keeps lodgers is expected to talk to strangers at odd hours, on the stairs, in the passage, at the door of a bedroom that has not been slept in, and Lorraine, in her good grey dress, with a ring of keys at her belt, was never questioned about what she did. She put the unsuspected guest on the third floor, near the stair. She talked to him through the breakfast hatch. She said, in the same level voice, that the house was full and the guest had better find another, and she waited to see what he did. She took, by the family's count, eleven of them, of which nine were done by a single quiet conversation and two by a short one, and she kept a rule that she would never raise her voice. She said that a thing that could be shouted at could be driven off, but that a thing that was spoken to had to answer. The Depression years came to the Westside hard. She kept her lodgers on credit, fed a number of drovers who could not pay and sold her mother's second sewing machine to cover the coal. Her mother, who was ageing, moved in with her, and Evelyn, who was married and living in the Deep South, wrote every week. The family took the view that Lorraine was a long-term proposition, a woman who would see out the work, and she did not argue with it. She was killed in the autumn of 1935 in a churchyard at Castroville, where she had gone after a report of disturbed graves. It was a calm night, and the old Alsatian stones stood in the dusk like teeth. She spoke to the figure that she found there, in the usual voice, and it answered, and while it answered a second figure came from behind the church wall and struck her on the back of the head with a fence rail. She was thirty-four. The cousins who found her at dawn said that she had fallen with her face to the gate and her hand on the ledger inside her coat, and that she had been, to the last, in the middle of a sentence. The pistol had not been drawn. Her mother, who survived her by a year, said that she had always hoped that someone would speak to her gently at the end, and had been glad to hear that it was her daughter who had done the speaking. Lorraine Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the keeper of the house on Alamo Street, the quiet one who asked a thing once and let it answer. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who work by patience and plain speech, who show that a steady voice at the right distance can be as sharp as any stake, and who prove that the dark will tell you a great deal if you are willing to wait for it.