Alan Thorne

Mercenary slayer of House of Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Red Ledger. Craft: Peel-Tower Watch.

Alan Thorne was born in 1769 in the Cumberland country of what would later be the city of Nashville, Tennessee, and he lived for seventy-one years as a riverboat pilot and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. He was a mountain hunter by descent, a keelboat man by trade and a mercenary by temperament, and the Proctor family of the White Ledger, to which his wife's line belonged, remembered him as the man who would take any hunt that paid fairly and finish it properly. His Ledger alias was The Red Ledger, a nickname that began as a joke between the rival houses and ended as a title of respect. He died of old age in 1840, in bed, which the Thornes counted a considerable achievement. The Thornes were border people. The House of Thorne had begun as reivers of the Northumbrian marches, the cattle-raiding families who lived on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish line in the sixteenth century, and after the Union of the Crowns had turned their talents for ambush and watchfulness to hunting vampires in the same hills. In the eighteenth century, like so many border families, they crossed the Atlantic and went up into the Appalachians, where the old skills of the peel tower, a fortified house with a watch kept on its roof, translated naturally to log stockades and ridge-top lookouts. Alan's father, Wallace Thorne, was a boatman and a hunter, born in 1733 and alive until 1806. The Ledger calls him The Sure Falcon, for his eyesight. Wallace had come down from the Watauga settlements to the Cumberland with the first waves of settlers, and Alan was born at a time when the bluffs above the French Lick, where the town of Nashville would be laid out, held little more than a few stockaded cabins. The Cumberland settlements of his boyhood were a frontier in the truest sense. Houses were forts. Fields were worked with a rifle within reach. The settlers made salt at the licks, traded with the Chickasaw and Cherokee where they could and fought them where they could not, and lived under the constant threat of raids. Alan grew up knowing how to load and fire a long rifle before he could write his name, how to read a trail, how to keep a fire low and how to sit through a night in a canebrake without coughing. His father taught him the family craft, which the Thornes called the Peel-Tower Watch, a discipline of patient, rotating observation in which a small group kept a perimeter so that no vampire could approach a settlement without being seen at least three times. It was less glamorous than a chase and far more effective. He was eighteen when the calling came, in 1787, after a wake. The dead man was a settler killed in a skirmish whom the neighbours had laid out on a table in his cabin, and in the small hours, as the mourners sat with their cider and their candles, the body sat up. Alan was the only one in the room who did not run. His father and the other men hunted what had risen, and the matter was settled before dawn, but from that night Alan carried the knowledge that he was a vampire slayer, and Wallace took him fully into the work, as his mentor, and never once let him forget a lesson. The gear of his trade was a long rifle and silver-cast shot. The long rifle, with its barrel more than forty inches long, was the frontier's precision weapon, accurate at two hundred yards in a good hand, and Alan was a very good hand. The silver he cast himself from coin and spoons, melting it in a ladle over a fire and pouring it into a bullet mould, a messy business that he never allowed anyone else to do. He was a mercenary in the classic sense of the Ledgers: he hunted for a fee, not for the tally, and he bargained over terms with settlements, traders and even rival hunters, until the Proctors and Faulkners alike had learned that Thorne money was not cheap and that Thorne work was not shoddy. The alias The Red Ledger came from the account book he kept in red-dyed leather, in which he wrote down every job, every price and every debt owed to him. Proctor hunters teased him for keeping a ledger of his own, red where theirs was white, and the name stuck. The river was his other trade. The Cumberland and the Ohio were the roads of the western country, and a keelboat pilot who could read the snags, sandbars and sawyers of the Cumberland was worth a great deal. Alan piloted flatboats and keelboats from Nashville down to the Mississippi and back up again, a journey of weeks that took him past every vice and opportunity of the frontier. He saw Natchez and New Orleans, sold tobacco and hides, bought salt and iron, and kept his long rifle under the thwart. He was on the river during the War of 1812, when Tennessee riflemen went south to join Andrew Jackson, and he carried more than one boatload of them down to the Gulf. In 1805 he married Lydia Proctor, who was born in 1775 and lived until 1841. She was a frontier widow who kept a trading post on the Cumberland, a sharp, capable woman with a head for accounts and a rifle of her own, and she was a vampire slayer of the White Ledger in her own right, a sister of the Winchester Proctors. Their marriage was a union of the Thorne and Proctor traditions. By the old custom the children carried the Proctor name, so their first son, Absalom Proctor, born in 1808 and dead in 1868, was a hunter of the White Ledger, and their second, Homer Thorne Proctor, born in 1810 and dead in 1852, carried the Thorne name in the middle of his own and was also called to the work. Alan taught them both the Peel-Tower Watch on the roof of the trading post. He grew old in Tennessee, watching the settlement he had been born in become a city. He died in 1840, aged seventy-one, on a winter night in the house by the river. His wife outlived him by a year. The Thorne family buried him in the family plot on a ridge above the Cumberland, with his long rifle laid across his knees and the red ledger under his hand. Alan Thorne is remembered in the Proctor and Thorne lines as the mercenary slayer of the Cumberland, the river pilot who charged fair and never abandoned a job. In the Slayerverse he stands for the moment when the old border tradition of the House of Thorne met the White Ledger, and the two merged into a single family with a river for a road.