Samuel Proctor Brewster

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Lone Scythe. Craft: Witness Reading.

Samuel Proctor Brewster was born in 1815 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and lived fifty-one years as a blacksmith and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Lone Scythe, a name that recalls the long, curved blade that he hung on the wall of his forge and the solitary way in which he cut a swathe through the valley's trouble, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by questions and records. His craft was Witness Reading, the art of hearing what a frightened person has not said. He was the son of the riverboat pilot Jonathan Brewster and the boarding-house keeper Deborah Proctor Bowen of Harpers Ferry. He married the laundress Cora Mather in 1842, raised two children, Harriet Brewster and Henry Brewster, and died in 1866 in a fire that had been set to draw him out, at fifty-one, during the hard years after the war. His father, Jonathan Brewster, born at Staunton in 1790 and dead in 1849, was a pilot on the Shenandoah and the Potomac, a careful, courteous man with a notebook of soundings. His mother, Deborah Proctor Bowen, born in 1789 and dead in 1867, ran a boarding house for river men at Harpers Ferry, a formidable, broad-shouldered, red-handed woman who could feed sixty in an hour. She was the elder sister of the midwife Rebecca Bowen Proctor, and a daughter of the laundress Hannah Cutler Proctor, whose family was the White Ledger's. Samuel was born at Harrisonburg, in the upper valley, in the house of his father's people, during a winter when Jonathan was working on the upper river and Deborah had gone to stay with kin for the confinement. She brought him home to Harpers Ferry in the spring, in a blanket, on a canal boat. He had a sister, Deborah Proctor Brewster, born in 1819. Harpers Ferry was the town he knew. It stood at the meeting of two great rivers, the Potomac and the Shenandoah, under a high cliff of rock, and in his boyhood it was a cramped, busy, steeply built place of stone houses, factories and warehouses, dominated by the United States Armory, which made muskets and employed some two hundred men. The town was all hill. Its streets were stairs, its houses clung to the slopes, and its people were in the habit of shouting from one level to another. The river was everywhere, loud and white over the rocks, and in spring flood it filled the lower town to the eaves. Samuel grew up in his mother's boarding house on the water, among boatmen, armourers, canal navvies and travellers, in a house that never had fewer than forty people in it, and he learned, with the dinner, how a crowd behaves. His mother taught him to keep a record. She did it in the way that she did everything, by example and without fuss. At six he was given a slate, and told to write down the names of every guest, the date that each arrived, the room he took and what he paid. At ten he had a book. At twelve he could tell from a man's hands what his trade was, from his boots where he had been and from the speed at which he ate what sort of week he had had. She said that it was the most useful lesson she could give him. A landlady who did not know her lodgers, she said, would very soon not have any. At fourteen he was apprenticed to the armoury's blacksmith shop, a long, smoky, roaring building on the Potomac in which a hundred men made locks, barrels and ramrods, and he learned the trade under a master who had served under the government's armourers for forty years. He was a quiet, steady, deliberate boy, who did not talk much. He learned to forge, to weld, to temper and to file. He learned to read the colour of a heat. By twenty he was a journeyman, and by twenty-five he had set up a forge of his own, in a shed at the back of the boarding house, where he made and mended tools, hinges, horseshoes and, in a small way, knives. The long scythe that gave him his alias hung above the door. He had made it himself, from a bar of Swedish iron, in a single week. At nineteen, having read a great many of the family's old letters and been told by his father's cousins that a vocation ran in the line, he declared to his mother that he was called to the work. She said that she had known since he was twelve, and gave him a small leather-bound notebook, blank, with a ribbon. It was not, however, the calling that the White Ledger counts. It was a resolve, not a summons. He spent the next twelve years watching, in the valley, for a sign, working with the older cousins, carrying messages and keeping his book. The summons itself, the thing that the Ledger calls the calling, came in 1846, when he was thirty-one. It came beside a river ford. He was riding home from Winchester, on a wet afternoon in October, along the road that crossed the Opequon at a shallow place, when he came on a traveller standing in the water. The man was a stranger in a long coat, well dressed, who stood in the middle of the ford, where the current ran to the knee, and looked at the bank. The horse would not go down. Samuel spoke to him, politely, across the stream, and asked if he required help. The traveller said that he was resting. He said it in a soft voice, without turning. He was asked where he was bound, and gave a town, and was asked why he had chosen that road, and gave another. He was asked a third question. Samuel, who had been taught since infancy to hear what the witness had left out, found that the answers, taken together, had a hole in them the shape of a man who could not come ashore. He sat on the horse for an hour. He did not dismount. He asked, at regular intervals, a mild, civil question, and listened to the answer, and by nightfall had worked out, by a process of elimination that took him through a good deal of cold and discomfort, where the man was going, who was waiting for him and why he would not leave the water. He sent for the men of the neighbourhood. He went back to Harpers Ferry. He did it in the morning, with help, and he was not at all satisfied with the job, which had been done on the evidence of other people. What he did was to study. He got hold of the eleven notebooks that his distant cousin Edwin Nichols Proctor, the Broker of Watauga, had kept on the same craft, which Edwin's brother Albert, after Edwin's death in the autumn of that same year, sent to him at Harpers Ferry, with a short note that said only that Edwin had been a good listener. Samuel read them through, in the winter of 1846, in the forge, by the fire, with his mother's book beside him, and he learned Witness Reading from a dead man's pages. It was a craft of patience and sympathy. A witness who is frightened, he learned, will tell one everything, but not in words. He will tell it in what he avoids. A witness who has seen something impossible will not describe the thing, but the room in which he saw it. A man who is lying will give too many details, and a man who is telling the truth, about a thing that he does not understand, will give too few. He became, for the next twenty years, the White Ledger's examiner in the valley. A hunter who had found something that he could not explain brought the witnesses to the forge at Harpers Ferry, or sent for him, and he sat down with each of them, in a corner, with a pipe and a notebook, and asked questions. He was a large, slow, dark man, with a long face, a grey streak in his hair and a voice that was so soft that people leaned towards it. He did not hurry. He had a habit of repeating the last thing that a witness had said, in a mild tone, as a question, and the witness, who had heard nothing but sympathy, would go on to say what he had not meant to. His work was the discovery, in the ordinary speech of frightened people, of the thing that could be taken to the hunters as a fact. He was a detective, in the Ledger's sense, and he hunted alone, mostly, as his alias suggests. He was not a solitary by temperament. But the method did not lend itself to company, and the valley was wide, and he worked by himself, on horseback, along the roads from Staunton to Harpers Ferry, with his notebook and his revolver, and a bag of silver-cast shot. He took, in twenty years, some forty vampires, in nearly all cases after the interviews had told him where to find them. In 1842 he had married Cora Mather, a laundress of Harpers Ferry, twenty-two years old, a stout, cheerful, strong-armed girl from a family of washerwomen who did the wash for half the armoury, and who had met him when she brought a load of shirts to his mother's kitchen. She said that she would marry him if he promised never to ask her a question. He said that it was a very hard bargain. They were married in the spring, and she moved into the rooms above the forge. Their daughter Harriet Brewster was born in 1845 and lived until 1872, and became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. Their son Henry Brewster was born in 1847 and lived until 1923, and did not hunt, but kept the forge going for four years after 1866 and then became a printer. He lived through the raid of John Brown on the armoury in 1859, and the war that followed it, in which Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times, and in which most of the town that he had known was burned. His mother's boarding house was destroyed. His own forge was wrecked twice, and he rebuilt it twice, and in the last year of the war, when the armoury was a ruin and the valley was a desert, he kept the family alive by shoeing cavalry horses, at gunpoint, for both sides. He was killed in the autumn of 1866. There had been a run of trouble in the town, in the months since the war, and he had been asked to look into it by the Ledger's cousins. He did, and found what he was looking for, and was getting close. In the night of the ninth of October, the forge behind the boarding house was set on fire, and in the noise of the alarm, as he ran out, he was struck down. It was a trap. The fire had been set to draw him out. He was fifty-one. He died in the ashes of his forge, among the things that he had made, with his wife at his side. His mother, who survived him by a year, buried him in the churchyard above the river. His son Henry, who took over the smithy, found in the ruins a scrap of the scythe, which he put in his pocket, and kept. Samuel Proctor Brewster is remembered in the Proctor family as The Lone Scythe, the blacksmith of Harpers Ferry, the detective who listened. In the Slayerverse he stands for the examiners of the White Ledger, the slayers who discovered that a frightened witness, patiently heard, will tell a hunter everything he needs to know about the dark.