Minnie Proctor Thorne was born in 1816 in Maysville, Kentucky, which was still called Limestone to the older boatmen, and kept a small shop in Lexington for more than forty years. She was the younger daughter of the circuit preacher Hob Thorne and the midwife Rebecca Bowen Proctor, a Thorne on her father's side and a Proctor on her mother's, and the sister of the midwife Hannah Proctor. She married the boatman and vampire slayer Callum Thorne in 1840, raised two sons, Hob Proctor Thorne and Henry Thorne Proctor, and died in 1887 of a stroke, at seventy-one. She was not a hunter, and she had no aptitude for it and no wish for one, but she was the only person in the world who could make a Thorne laugh at himself, and for forty-seven years she held together, behind a counter, a household in which a man of a bitter temper and a son of a hard one were both able to live.
Her father, Hob Thorne, born in 1787 and dead in 1839, was the only Thorne who ever gave a sermon instead of an ambush, and a Methodist itinerant whose circuit took him up and down the Kentucky country. Her mother, Rebecca Bowen Proctor, born in 1792 and dead in 1857, was the midwife and White Ledger informant whose network ran from Maysville to Frankfort. Minnie was born in her father's own birthplace, at the landing on the Ohio where the flatboats put in and the emigrants climbed the steep road to the interior, in a rented room above a chandler's store, in the last week of the winter. Her elder sister Hannah, who was a year old, sat on the bed and watched.
She was a quick, dark, round-cheeked child, with a high colour and a trick of answering back. She had her father's humour and her mother's energy, and she was a great trial to both. She was forever out of the wagon, into the creek, up the tree or under the preacher's pulpit, and at six she was found in the middle of a camp meeting, in front of eight hundred people, leading the singing of a hymn, in a high, true voice, which she had been told not to do. She was removed. Her father, who was an honest man, said privately that he had never heard it better sung.
She grew up on the circuit. She learned to read from her father's hymn book and to count from her mother's bills, and she learned, by observation, the great law of the itinerant life, which was that one could never have too many friends. She made them. She talked to everyone. At every farm, parsonage and tavern on the road she found someone, a child, a cook, a stableman, with whom she got on, and within a year she had a network of acquaintances that extended from the Ohio to the Cumberland. Her mother, who noticed, put it to use. A child who knew everyone could go anywhere and hear anything, and Rebecca, who was in the business of knowing what was wrong in a district, was glad of the help.
She was twenty-three when her father died, in 1839, in a fall from a horse on a wet ridge road. It was a blow. She was, of the two sisters, the more like him, and she took it the harder. She went with her mother and sister to Lexington, where the Methodists had a parsonage and a number of friends, and took a room in a house on Mill Street. Within a year she had opened a small shop.
The shop was on Main Street, in a narrow brick building between a chemist and a saddler, with a bow window. It sold ribbons, tea, stationery, combs, needles, thread, sealing wax, almanacs and small sundries, and it was run with a briskness that astonished the town. She had no training in trade, but she had a flair for it. She knew what a customer wanted before he did. She knew, too, how to be a pleasure to deal with, in a town that liked to be dealt with pleasantly, and she was said to have the best gossip in the district. She had a stool behind the counter, from which she could see the whole street. She had, in a drawer under it, a small, plain, green-bound book, in which she wrote the names of the people who came in.
It was at a funeral in 1840 that she met Callum Thorne. He was a hunter, a boatman of the Kentucky River, twenty-six, thin, dark and sharp-featured, with a scowl that might have been inherited, who stood at the back of the church in black, with the air of a man who would rather be elsewhere. He had come, she learned, to collect a fee from the dead man's family. She had noticed him before. He had been standing outside her shop, in the dusk of an October evening, with a dog at his heel, for a full hour, and she had watched him from behind the curtain. She asked, at the funeral, what he had been doing. He said that he had been thinking. She said, dryly, that it must have been a great deal.
They were married in the same year. She knew, from the first, what he was. Her family was a White Ledger family, and he was a Thorne, and there was nothing about his profession that surprised her. What surprised her was that he was so very unhappy. He had buried his father at nineteen, in a ditch, in the rain, and had been angry ever since, and he did not seem to know it. She took no notice of the temper. She teased him. She told him that the bitterness was a bad habit, and that he would have a better time without it, and, in time, he had.
They lived in the house behind her shop, in Lexington, with a kennel in the yard, and she kept a place in it for his hounds. She said that she would not have been married to a man who had no dogs. She looked after them, too, when he was away on the river, and she took a particular interest in the old brindled bitch of the Reiver line, which followed her about the shop and lay under the counter, to the alarm of the customers. She brought up her sons in a house that smelled of tea and wet hound.
Hob Proctor Thorne was born in 1842 and lived until 1923, and became a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne like his father. Henry Thorne Proctor was born in 1846 and lived until 1910, and did not hunt. He was a gentle, round, bookish boy, with his mother's dimples, and she kept him by her, teaching him the trade, and he eventually took over the shop. Hob, who had his father's face and his grandfather's temper, she watched with a certain anxiety. She taught him that the world was mostly full of people who wanted to be kind, and that it did not do to forget it.
Her mother Rebecca, who had come to live in Lexington when Hob Thorne died, and who was the great midwife of the region, lived in the house on Mill Street with Hannah, and Minnie saw her daily. The two women were very alike, and quarrelled cheerfully. When Rebecca died, in 1857, it was Minnie who sat with her, and who read, by request, a chapter of Ruth. She was forty-one.
Her husband was away a great deal. He was a mercenary, in the family's terms, and his hunts took him across the Ohio and the Wabash, in pursuit of quarries that had gone beyond the state, and for months at a time she managed the shop and the household alone. She did it without complaint. She had, in a locked drawer, a map of the Middle West, on which she marked, in pencil, the last known position of her husband, from his letters. She had it by her when the war came, and her elder son went to it, in a cavalry company, in 1862.
She sold through the war. The shop, in a divided city, in a divided state, did a brisk business in ribbons for both causes, and she took care to have a good supply of each colour. She also, it is said, did a considerable trade in news. Her customers were officers, privates, civilians and spies, and she knew them all. She did not talk. She listened, and wrote in the little green book, and passed it, every month, to a cousin.
She lived for twenty-two more years. She took in, at sixty, a niece to help in the shop, and gave up the stool, and her son took over. She died in the autumn of 1887, at seventy-one, of a stroke, in the room at the back. The old hound under the counter, which had been sleeping through a good deal of the morning, raised its head, and lay down again.
Minnie Proctor Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the shopkeeper of Lexington, the wife who laughed a bitter man out of his bitterness. In the Slayerverse she stands for the counter-keepers of the White Ledger, the women who sold ribbons, listened to everyone and said a single kind word when it was most needed.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
