Catriona Thorne

Slayer of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Catriona Thorne was born in 1631 in Alnwick, Northumberland, in the shadow of the Percy castle, in a town that lived by the wool market, the Lesbury road and the constant, low-level fear of what came over the border after dark. She belonged to the House of Thorne, the family of border reivers who for generations had ridden the Northumbrian marches, stealing cattle in one decade and guarding the same herds in the next, and who by her time had turned a good deal of that old riding skill toward a quieter and more dangerous trade. Her parents do not survive in the ledgers by name; the Thorne records say only that her father kept horses for a household on the Aln and that her mother taught the girls of the street their letters from a horn-book by the kitchen fire. It was from that kitchen that Catriona took the two habits that governed her whole life: the patience to teach, and the habit of listening for a sound at the door. Her childhood fell across the civil wars, which split the northern gentry down the middle. She was eleven when the king raised his standard, and she grew up among neighbours who had quarrelled over whether to pay ship money, whether to sign the Covenant, whether to hide a plate chest from the Scots army that quartered itself across Northumberland in the 1640s. Hungry soldiers stripped the barns around Alnwick, and one winter the family lived on oatcake and small beer while the horses were taken. Thorne cousins from the upland farms slipped down the valleys in those years with news and with warnings, and the young Catriona learned that the real war her family fought was not the one printed in the newsbooks. Old men of the house spoke of it softly: there were things that hunted along the confusion of an army's path, and a country full of unburied dead was a country full of appetites. She learned to read a tracked-up frost, to keep a tinderbox dry, and to hold a hawthorn cutting without flinching at the thorns. She never married, and the Thorne accounts are unsentimental about the reason. She had suitors, among them a wool factor whose family thought well of her, but she turned him down in her twenties and did not look back. What she wanted, she told a cousin, was a schoolroom of her own and an evening to herself. In the 1650s she took a post as a teacher, first in a dame school in Alnwick and then, when her reputation spread, in the market towns and along the coaching roads of Yorkshire, where a spinster who could teach reading, sums and a fair round hand was always in demand. She lodged with a chandler's widow, kept a plain grey gown and a good pair of spectacles, and gained a name for firmness with idle boys and kindness with frightened girls. Her pupils remembered that she never raised her voice and never had to. The calling came in 1662, when she was thirty-one. She had gone out to the fields with a hunting party of local gentlemen, invited to sketch the country for a map her employer wanted, and the day ended badly: the hounds came back at dusk without the huntsman. The men stood about arguing over whether he had taken a fall. Catriona, who had watched the dogs come in with their tails clamped down and their eyes rolling, walked out alone into the stubble with a borrowed lantern and found what was left of him at the hedge, and what stood over him. The Thorne ledger is brief about what followed, noting only that she was found at first light sitting against a gatepost with the huntsman's fowling piece across her knees, her hands stained to the wrist and the creature nowhere to be seen. From that morning on she was a vampire slayer, and she knew it as plainly as she knew the sound of her own name. The Thornes of the upland valleys sent a cousin down to see her, and he found a woman who had already begun, in her methodical way, to plan. She took the name the ledgers give her, The Fallow Anvil, from the field where she was called and from her own temperament, which was something like a smith's block: it took blows and did not shift. She trained, in the Soldier's way, for endurance and order rather than flash, and her craft, the Peel-Tower Watch, was the discipline of holding a fixed point through a long night. It came out of the old border habit of keeping a lit brazier and a sentry on the tower roof, and she adapted it to the inns, chapels, coach houses and barn yards of the Yorkshire roads: she chose a corner with a good view of every approach, sat in it from dusk to dawn, and counted the ways in. Her gear was a flintlock pistol, which she loaded with a wrapped charge she rolled herself, and a supply of hawthorn stakes cut in winter and seasoned under the schoolroom floor. She did not go looking for fights. She let the fights come to the places she had already chosen. Her working years were spent in a country recovering from war and unsettled by rumour. She lived through the great plague year of 1665, which in the north was patchier than in London but brought its own dread, with quarantined villages and market stalls set at the parish boundary so that coin could be dropped in vinegar. Catriona kept her school shut and her doors barred, and the ledger records that several of her nights that year were spent at a boundary stone, watching for the thing that fed on shuttered houses. She wrote her entries in the sober hand of a teacher: a date, a place, the hour, the count. Her tally was not large, but it was noted for what it did not contain, since the Thornes observed that she almost never took a wound, and that those she stood watch for tended to sleep sound afterwards. In 1668 she had a daughter, Heather Thorne, and here the record is discreet. There was no husband named, and the family took the child in without argument, as the Thornes had long taken in whatever the marches produced. She raised Heather in the schoolroom and on the roads, and taught her the same things she taught everyone: letters, sums, a fair round hand. Heather was also taught how to watch a room and how to load a pistol in the dark. The girl became a slayer herself, and in 1697 she married Joseph Proctor Lister, joining the Thorne line to the Proctor side of the great rivalry. Catriona, then sixty-six, is said to have given the match her blessing with the dry remark that at least he had a steady hand with a ledger. She made a point, ever after, of teaching her grandchildren that the rivalry between the Red Ledger and the White was a contest of counting and not of blood, and that a Thorne who forgot it would be no help to either side. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 passed through her life mostly as a matter of sermons and oaths, and she said little about it. The Thorne story is that she remarked once that kings came and went and the dark stayed where it was. She continued to teach into her seventies, and when the eyes failed she taught by ear, sitting in a chair by the window with a boy at her elbow reading aloud. In 1717 she went out on the fells above a village she had known for decades, on some errand the records do not record beyond a note that she went alone, and she was found at the foot of a scree slope. She died that year of an accident on the fells, at eighty-six, an age that struck the family as extraordinary for a woman who had spent fifty-five years of it standing night watches. The Thornes remember her as the patient one, the slayer who proved that a hunt could be won by having arrived first. In the ledgers she is a small name with a long span, and later families of the Slayerverse have cited the Peel-Tower Watch as a model of preparation over pursuit. Her spectacles, it is said, were buried with her.