Ailsa Thorne

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

Ailsa Thorne kept a shop counter for most of her adult life and a stave behind it for most of that. Born in 1593 at Kielder, in the empty forested hills of North Tynedale in Northumberland, she died sixty-six years later on a Lancashire fell, having outlived a war, two plagues and a good many people who had underestimated her. She belonged to the House of Thorne, the border reivers of the Northumbrian marches who later became mountain hunters, and she was known in that house by the alias The Bitter Stave, a name she earned honestly and did not much like. Kielder in the 1590s was the far edge of England. The North Tyne rises there in wet moorland and black pine-less hills, and the valley had been, within living memory, the domain of the great riding surnames: Charltons, Milburns, Robsons, Dodds and Thornes, who raided the Scots side and were raided in return, kept peel-towers and bastle houses with cattle in the ground floor and the family above, and paid protection to nobody. When Ailsa was a child the border laws were still those of the Wardens of the Marches, and the old economy of the cattle-lift, the blackmail and the hot trod was dying under the pressure of the crown. The union of the crowns in 1603 finished it. Families like hers had to choose whether to become farmers, carriers, tradesmen or emigrants, and the Thornes, being a hardy and practical clan, chose all of them at once. Her childhood was spent in a bastle house of thick stone and small windows. Her days were oatmeal porridge, hard bannocks and salted mutton, peat smoke, and the constant labour of a household that could not buy what it could not make. She learned to card wool, to knit, to keep accounts on notched sticks, and, more usefully, to tell what a strange noise in the dark was. The family told stories about the moss-troopers, and some of those stories were not about troopers. Ailsa was a tall, bony girl with a long, humourless face and a way of looking at people that made them recount their morning to her whether they meant to or not. She was also strong. She could carry a full milk-kit up from the burn without stopping, and had her father's habit, so the family said, of standing very still when she was angry. The calling came in 1615, at a river ford, when she was twenty-two. She was on the road out of the hills with a pack of goods for the market town when a traveller she had been walking beside failed to leave the water. He had waded in to cross and stood mid-stream, up to his thighs, looking back at her, and she watched the current part around him as if he were a rock. What she did next was so unlike her that it startled her afterwards: she took the staff from her shoulder and went into the ford after him. She did not remember most of the fight. She remembered the cold, the sound of the water, and the sensation, once it was over, of understanding what her family had been half-hinting at for twenty years. The Thornes had always known the hills were not empty. Now Ailsa knew it too, and no mentor stood behind her to tell her what to do next. She became a vampire slayer without a teacher, and taught herself, badly at first and then very well, from what her kin had let slip and what the fells had taught her. That same year, 1615, she gave birth to a son, Stuart Thorne, so the calling and the child arrived within months of each other, an overlap she later described as the only time in her life she had felt truly outnumbered. Stuart lived until 1688 and was not called; he was a quiet, dutiful boy with his mother's long face and none of her temper. Ailsa raised him in a Lancashire town, having followed a route south from the border that many Thorne families took, and became a shopkeeper's wife, the occupation the parish register gives her. The shop sold thread, tallow candles, nails, salt, ribbons and the odd length of hand-loom cloth from the weaving villages, and from behind its counter she watched the district, noting which travellers stayed a night and which were seen only after dark. Her craft was Hill Stalking. It was an ancient border skill: the art of moving over open moorland and broken fell without being seen, reading the ground for signs, and coming at a quarry from above and downwind. She hunted in the Pennine edge country around the Lancashire towns, in the weeks when the shop could spare her, wearing an old plaid over her working dress and carrying a flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, the standard Thorne outfit of her day. Her methods were patient and unshowy. She never chased; she waited, and in her forties she would sit for a whole night on a boulder above a sheepfold with her hands in her sleeves, until the thing she was waiting for made its mistake. The name The Bitter Stave came from a Lancashire carrier who once watched her drive a hawthorn stake through a vampire in a barn doorway and then ask him, with the same sour civility she used on customers, whether he wished to settle his account. Her nature matched the alias. She was blunt, exacting about weights and change, and quick to notice a lie. She was not cruel, but she had little sympathy for the sort of hunter who wanted admiration for an ordinary night's work, and she disliked the more theatrical members of her house. The Thornes, who kept their own records and were not much given to the ledger rivalries of Lancashire and Yorkshire, regarded her with respect and a small degree of fear. She was, by her own choice, entirely separate from the contest of tallies between the Faulkners and Proctors, but that ceased to be true in 1636. In that year her son Stuart married Millicent Faulkner, a woman of the Lancastrian line, and Ailsa found herself, at forty-three, the mother-in-law of a house that kept the Red Ledger. She took it in her stride. She judged Millicent, after a brief, shrewd inspection across the shop counter, to be capable, and was heard to observe that a Faulkner who knew how to keep books was better than a Thorne who did not. The match brought her closer to the Faulkner hunters of the district, and she was quietly useful to them for the rest of her life, passing on what she had learned of the tracks and cover of the high ground, and teaching a younger generation how a body could be made small on an open hillside. The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, passed over her shop as they passed over all the Lancashire shops, in a blur of billeted soldiers, requisitioned horses and unpaid debts. She kept the counter open through all of it and the stave behind it. She died in 1659, aged sixty-six, of an accident on the fells, on the kind of ground she had known her whole life. She had gone up alone, as she often did, on a wet autumn afternoon, and the track that had held under her for fifty years gave way. It was, her family said, an ordinary end for a woman of the hills, and a hard one to reconcile with a lifetime of caution. Stuart, then forty-four, brought her down himself. In the wider Slayerverse she is remembered as the shopkeeper's wife who taught Lancashire to look at its own hillsides twice.