Elspeth Thorne

Hunter slayer of House of Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Red Warden. Craft: Hound Handling.

The traveller at the ford did not leave the water, and Elspeth Thorne, who had crossed that river a hundred times with a string of ponies, knew at once that something was wrong with the way he stood. It was the spring of 1529. She was twenty-three, a horse-dealer in the saddle from before light, riding a mare south from Yorkshire toward the Wharfe with a halter-rope in each hand and two border hounds loping behind her. The man was in the middle of the ford, to his knees, in a place where the current ran fast and cold. He should have been in a hurry. He was not even shivering. The hounds stopped dead on the bank and would not go on, and the mare began to sweat. Elspeth sat very still. She had been raised among people who told stories about things that walked in water, and had always supposed that those stories were what they sounded like. That afternoon, with a hawthorn stake and a great deal of cold nerve, she learned otherwise, and she was a vampire slayer from that hour. She had been born in 1505 at Hexham, in Northumberland, in the old priory town above the Tyne, in country that had belonged to nobody in particular for three hundred years. The House of Thorne, her family, were border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, hill people who had once lived by raiding and by the careful business of knowing which side of the line a cow was on, and who had, over several generations, turned their skills to a different quarry. They were hunters by temperament and by long habit. They had mist and hills and hounds, and a way of reading ground that the lowland Proctors would have envied. Elspeth's parents are not named in the White Ledger, and she was in later years inclined to say that they were not much given to being written down. She was the only child of a house of working horse-copers, who bought and sold between Hexham, Carlisle and the great Yorkshire fairs, and she learned to ride before she learned to read. Horses were her trade and hounds her gift. The craft the House of Thorne called Hound Handling was less a skill than a partnership: a way of running with a pack and understanding what it was telling her. She could read a dog's ears across a hillside, and she bred her own line of rough-coated border hounds, long-legged, silent on a track and indifferent to fear. In the dealing yards of the north she was known for an unusual honesty about a horse's faults, which did her trade no harm and her reputation a great deal of good. She had red hair in a plait and a hard seat, and she was frank to the point of rudeness. At the fairs, where men tried to sell her broken-winded nags, she would run a hand down a hock and say what was wrong with it before the man had finished his patter. She took the alias The Red Warden after the hair and the watching. For gear she carried a matchlock pistol, an awkward thing to keep alight in the wet, and hawthorn stakes, which her family had always preferred to any other wood. The pistol, she admitted, was mostly for the noise; the hounds did the work, and the stakes finished it. Her method was that of the Thorne hunters: she let the hounds find, the ground tell, and her own patience do the rest. A hunt for Elspeth was a long walk in the dark, a pack at her heels, a lantern shuttered, and a firm decision about where to stand. She met Nicholas Proctor at a horse fair near Wetherby, a year before her calling, when she brought a string of border ponies south and found that his carrier's wagon was the only one in the yard that could take them on to York without a lost shoe. He was a slow, steady, plain-spoken man of twenty-six, sunburned about the neck, with a way of listening that made a person say more than she had meant to. She thought him the first man she had ever met who could be trusted with a horse's feet and a woman's opinion. They were married in 1528, at Wetherby, and she took her dealing business with her, setting up stabling on the edge of the town. Her husband's mother, Agnes Barlow, was a slayer who had died eight years earlier; his brother John was another. Elspeth, who had thought she was marrying into a family of carriers and shepherds, found a slayer family with a Ledger and a rivalry, and discovered that she was marrying into work she had been quietly preparing for all her life. Their children were Ninian Proctor, born in 1530, who became a slayer; Grizel Proctor, born in 1534; and Wilfred Proctor, born in 1538. She taught Ninian the hounds and the ground; she taught Grizel to haggle and Wilfred to ride; and she kept the stable lantern lit for her husband's late returns. She and Nicholas worked in tandem for most of two decades, the Hunter and the Broker, as the family put it. When there was a trail to follow she and the dogs ran it down, and when there were people to be talked into silence or into sense he went in with his seal. Neither interfered with the other. It was, by most accounts, one of the more successful partnerships in the White Ledger's long history, and also one of the quietest. The northern risings of 1536 and 1537 were hard on a horse-dealer. Every army wanted horses and none wanted to pay, and she kept her best stock in a hidden fold on the moor above the town and sold the rest to whoever came with silver. She also took the opportunity, in those lawless months, to hunt in earnest; the roads were empty after dark and the dead had the run of them. Her hounds took two in one winter. She entered them in the Ledger under her husband's seal, with the witnesses he insisted upon, and in the margin of the second she wrote, in her uneven hand, that the creature had been tracked for six miles and had not run. She had no patience for the old matter of the Guest at Towton, in the Wars of the Roses, and told Nicholas that a quarrel that old should be put to the hounds, who would settle it by lunchtime. The religious upheaval of 1549 to 1560 passed over her in the stable yard, where it appeared as rumour and a change in the sorts of prayer-books left in the inns. In 1555 Nicholas died of exposure on a winter watch, and she rode up the hill in the dark to bring him down. She did not weep in the yard. She went to the kennels, sat among the dogs for a long time, and in the morning returned to the stable, and her son Ninian took the hounds out on the day after the burial. She went on dealing for another seventeen years, with a harder face and a quicker temper, and kept her husband's pistol cleaned and oiled above the door. She died in 1572, from a fall from a horse, on a young, ill-broken colt that she had insisted on riding herself because nobody else would. She was sixty-seven, and had been warned. The colt shied at a hare on the Tadcaster road, and she went over its shoulder onto the stones. She died that evening, at home, with the hounds lying across the threshold and the stable lantern lit. Elspeth Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the border hunter who carried the hounds south into Yorkshire and made them part of the Proctors' work, and as the Red Warden who never learned to be less direct. The White Ledger gives her tallies in her husband's seal and her own plain hand, and records that no dog of hers was ever lost to a hunt. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Thorne gift at its best: the hill-bred patience, the pack that trusts its handler, and the willingness to ride out into the dark with nothing but a lantern, a pistol that might not fire, and the confidence that the hounds knew the way.