The Tyne at Hexham runs wide and shallow over gravel, and in the year 1586, when Alastair Thorne was born on its banks, the crossing below the abbey church was still done more often by boat than by bridge. He came from the House of Thorne, the border reiver families of the Northumbrian marches who had lived for centuries by the rules of a lawless country, riding, raiding, guarding and, when it was needed, hunting the things that came down out of the fells. By the time of his birth the old reiving was ending. The union of the crowns under King James in 1603 would soon close the Border as an English and Scottish frontier, and men who had made their living by the sword and the night ride would need new trades. Alastair belonged to the generation that had to find them.
His father, Hector Thorne, born in 1553, was a ferryman, and it was a proper Thorne occupation, since whoever controlled the crossing knew who came and went. Hector worked a broad flat-bottomed boat on a rope and pole, carrying travellers, cattle and cart-loads of oats from bank to bank, and he was said never to have drowned a beast in thirty years. He was a short, weathered man with a big voice and an even bigger memory for the genealogies of the Border families, who could name the grandfathers of half the dales and who was married to whom. The records say nothing about Alastair's mother beyond the fact that she existed, and Alastair himself, in later years, spoke of her seldom. He had no brothers and no sisters, which was unusual for the Thornes and gave him a solitary boyhood spent largely on the water, learning the moods of the river and the habits of those who crossed it.
Hexham in those years was a hard little market town of stone houses and cattle pens, still bearing the scars of many raids, with a moot hall, a jail and a great church that had been a priory. Winters were long and cruel, the land marginal, and clan feuds not always forgotten. Alastair was taught to ride, to handle a lance and a steel cap, and to keep his mouth shut. The Thorne stories also included another tradition, the one that separated the family from its neighbours: the belief that things walked on the moors that were not reivers, and that the family owed the countryside a watch. That tradition passed down as habit and as gear in a locked chest, and by his late teens Alastair knew what was in it, though he was not himself called to the work. He became instead a yeoman, a small landholder with a farm above the river, some cattle and a share of common grazing, and a reputation for being a careful, dry-witted man of steady judgement.
Around 1610 Alastair's fortunes turned south. Some accounts say the Thorne holdings around Hexham were reduced by a quarrel with a neighbour, and others that he was sent by his family to keep a watching brief on the roads that ran into Yorkshire. What is certain is that he took up a tenancy in the market towns of Yorkshire, a country of coaching inns and cattle fairs where the House of Proctor kept its White Ledger, and that his Northumbrian accent, thick as porridge, became a local curiosity. In a market town a few days' ride south of Hexham he met Christiana Proctor, born in 1592, a young woman known locally as the tavern keeper's daughter, and a member of the Yorkist family whose ledger had been open since 1455. She was quick, warm and much amused by his accent, and she is said to have told him at their first meeting that he sounded like a gate that needed oil.
They married in 1615, when he was twenty-nine and she twenty-three. The wedding joined two of the great old strands of the slayer world, the border Thornes and the Yorkshire Proctors, and it was celebrated more warmly than the record suggests: by the family accounts the feast ran three days and included a whole roast ox, a great deal of ale, and a set of bagpipes that the Proctors regretted to the end of their lives. The couple set up house in a stone farmhouse at the edge of the town, with a barn, a byre and an orchard, and Alastair, who could not leave off the habit of looking at roads, added a stout gate and a good lock. He farmed the land as a yeoman, with cattle and a little arable, and took in extra income by keeping horses for travellers on the coaching road.
Their daughters arrived in swift succession. Christiana Thorne was born in 1616, named for her mother, and Sibyl Proctor followed in 1617, taking the Proctor surname by the family custom that let names pass through the female line. Both girls grew up amid the odd doubled culture of a border house planted in Yorkshire: Alastair told them Northumbrian tales at night, while Christiana Proctor taught them the White Ledger's own methods. The elder girl, Christiana Thorne, grew into a slayer, a tall, silent, watchful young woman whom her father taught to ride and read a track and to shoot a bow. The younger, Sibyl, was a different sort, a quiet, exact child who kept the household accounts before she was twelve and who, in her own way, was every bit as much her father's daughter.
Alastair never took the field himself against the monsters of the Slayerverse, and he was honest about it. He described his part as the one who kept the door, and that was accurate. He maintained the family's horses and their gear, kept the routes into the Yorkshire dales, and offered the hearth as a place where hunters could rest. He shared the White Ledger's rivalry with the Faulkners only mildly, as a border man who had seen enough feuding to know its price; when Lancashire cousins passed through, as they did, Alastair had a way of pouring the ale first for whoever was most likely to start an argument. The Thorne view of the long dispute over the vampire the ledgers call the Guest was, in his mouth, that a good many people were going to be blamed for it, and the sensible course was to be neither.
The civil wars split the northern gentry and, more roughly, the yeomen who farmed beneath them. Yorkshire was fought over from 1642, and the coaching roads that Alastair had watched all his life filled with baggage trains, foraging parties and stragglers. He was fifty-six when the war began and turned his barn into a shelter for wounded men of either side, an act that earned him a mixed reputation and, in one hard winter, a visit from soldiers who took most of his hay. Christiana Proctor had died in 1641, a year before the fighting began, and was spared it. Alastair lived on alone, quiet and stubborn, with his daughters near enough to visit. In 1653, aged sixty-seven, he died of the plague in the market town where he had lived for four decades, and was buried beside his wife.
His grave carried a border surname, and the Proctors who kept the ledger for another two centuries always spoke of him as the Northumbrian who came to them by way of a ferry rope. His elder daughter, Christiana, lived until 1693, and Sibyl until 1685. In the memory of the family he is the ferryman's son who found a crossing of his own, the man who brought the discipline of the House of Thorne into the Proctor line and asked nothing in return except that the gate be kept oiled.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
