Rachel Thorne Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Rachel Thorne Proctor was born in 1755 at Harrisonburg, Virginia, the eldest daughter of the circuit preacher Benjamin Proctor and his wife Isobel Thorne, a milliner. She belonged to the Yorkist branch of the family, the keepers of the White Ledger, and descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. She was not a vampire slayer and never wished to be one, but she spent her whole life close to the work, and the ledgers of her house record her as one of the people who made that work possible. Her earliest years were shaped by absence and return. Benjamin Proctor rode a preaching circuit through the Valley of Virginia, from the Potomac fords to the upper reaches of the Shenandoah, and he might be gone for three weeks at a stretch, coming home with mud to the saddle-girths and a notebook full of names. The family knew him in the ledger as The Long Latch, a slayer who could open any door the dead had closed behind them, and the preaching was in part a cover for a hunter's travel. Harrisonburg in the 1750s was scarcely a town at all: a scatter of log houses and a courthouse-to-be on ground taken up by Scots-Irish and German settlers, with the great wagon road running north and south past the door and the Blue Ridge standing blue on the eastern horizon. Rachel learned to count wagons by the sound of their axles before she could read. Her mother ran the household in her father's absence. Isobel Thorne had come out of the House of Thorne, the border-reiver and mountain-hunting family, and she brought its habits with her: a sharp eye for a stranger, a knack for keeping a fire banked all night, and a milliner's exact hands. She made bonnets, caps and trimmed hats for the wives of the valley from bought ribbon and straw, and she was paid in coin when the season was good and in butter, flax and dried apples when it was not. Rachel sat beside her from the age of six, learning to stitch a hem and to keep accounts in a small cramped hand. The habit of the account book was the one great inheritance of both her houses, and she carried it into every corner of her later life. The family moved to Winchester, where her sister Deborah Proctor was born in 1759, so that Rachel grew up in a house that was half shop, half meeting place, with travelling hunters, drovers and preachers passing through its kitchen. What set Rachel apart within it was steadiness. She had none of her father's restlessness and none of the Thorne wariness; she was a broad, calm girl with strong forearms and a habit of humming while she worked, and neighbours who could not have said why still felt easier for having her in the room. Her father, who knew what the calling looked like when it came, watched her through her sixteenth and seventeenth years for the signs of it, and did not see them. He told his wife privately that he was relieved, and Isobel, who had married into the danger with open eyes, said she was not sure she was. In 1777 Rachel married Thomas Cooke, a wheelwright of the Valley, and the wedding was held in the middle of a war. She was twenty-two, and he was twenty-seven. The Revolution had reached the Shenandoah less as battle than as demand: militia musters at the courthouse, requisitions of wagons and horses, and Continental paper money that lost its worth from month to month. A wheelwright was in the very centre of that demand. Thomas Cooke spent the war building and mending the wheels of army wagons from seasoned oak, ash and hickory, shrinking iron tyres onto them in a hot ring of coals and cooling them with buckets from the well, and it was one of the odd advantages of paper money that a man who could be paid in work and goods did better than a man who was owed cash. The Cookes took a small house with a shop and yard on the Winchester road, and Rachel kept his books as she had kept her mother's. Two sons followed. Jonathan Cooke Proctor was born in 1779, and the family gave him the Proctor name as a middle name, in keeping with the old custom by which the surname travelled through daughters when it needed to. John Cooke was born in 1781, and it was John who received the calling in due course, so that he became a slayer while his brother never did. Rachel raised both boys with the same rule: they were to learn a trade first and the family business second. Jonathan learned his father's yard; John learned to read the weather, the wagon roads and the tempers of horses, and later came to the ledger with all three skills. Rachel's own contribution to the Proctor cause was quiet and practical. Because her father's circuit brought news, and because her husband's yard drew every kind of traveller, her house became a listening post. A drover who mentioned that his cattle had been found drained in a hollow near Front Royal, or a teamster who spoke of a stranger who would not come in from the cold, would find his words written down in her neat hand that evening and sent on to the White Ledger with the next rider. She did not hunt, but she sorted the true accounts from the tavern lies with a farmer's suspicion of anything that sounded too good, and the entries she vouched for were taken as sound. Her sister Deborah, who lived nearby, often stayed with her, and together they kept the sort of accounts of the neighbourhood that no hunter could have managed on the road. The rivalry with the Faulkner line touched her only at a distance. The Red Ledger's people were by then in New England and Kentucky, and what Rachel knew of them came through her father's letters, which teased and bristled in equal measure about the tallies of the Lancastrian side. She kept a pragmatic view of the old quarrel over the Guest, the vampire who had escaped at Towton in 1461: she had heard the Proctor account from childhood, she had no reason to doubt it, and she also thought that the two families would have done better to spend their arguing hours on the present day's hunting. That view, mild as it was, made her a useful person to have at the table when the two houses next exchanged messages. She died in 1801, of old age, at forty-six. The phrase is the family's own, and it describes a body worn thin early by work, childbearing in a hard country, and the wartime years when there was never quite enough to eat; her neighbours said only that she had used herself up on other people. Her parents outlived her by three years, both dying in 1804, and her husband followed in 1808. Her sons carried on, and John Cooke took the name of the family's work into the new century. In the Slayerverse, Rachel Thorne Proctor is remembered as the bookkeeper of a Shenandoah household, the woman who held a wheelwright's yard, a hunter's daughter's inheritance and a network of gossip together in a single ledger hand. The White Ledger gives her no tally, because she took no prey, but a marginal note in a later hand describes her as the reason the entries from the valley in those years can be trusted at all.