Effie Thorne

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Effie Thorne was born in 1843 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived fifty-six years as a herbalist in the eastern hills and the market of the Bluegrass. She was the elder daughter of the farmer and vampire slayer Ninian Thorne, The Fallow Warden, and of the boarding-house keeper Effie Faulkner, and the sister of the slayer Emma Thorne Faulkner. She belonged to the House of Thorne by her father's name and to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger through her mother, and she did not hunt. She never married. What she did, for some thirty-five years, was grow, dry, grind and sell the plants that kept the hunters of the Kentucky country on their feet, and she was known from the headwaters of the Kentucky River to the Lexington market as the woman with the green thumb and the blue stall. She died in the spring of 1899 of cancer, at fifty-six, a few months before her younger sister, and was buried on the hill above the farm. The best way to understand her is by her garden, which she laid out herself, in 1862, on a south-facing slope behind her father's house, and which she kept for the rest of her life. It was a hillside of long, narrow beds, each bordered with a row of flat stones, and the beds were planted, she said, in the order of the ills. At the top, nearest the house, were the kitchen simples: sage, thyme, parsley, feverfew, chamomile, balm. Below them were the beds for burns and cuts, yarrow, comfrey, plantain and St John's wort, and below those the bitter plants, the boneset and horehound and wormwood that one takes for a fever or a bad stomach. On the lowest terrace, by the spring, grew the ones that she did not show to visitors: the valerian, the hops and the poppies, which she grew for sleep. A hunter, she used to say, who could not sleep was a hunter who would not be alive in the spring. She was born in a bedroom at the back of the Putnam house on Short Street in Lexington, because her mother, who had kept the kitchen there before her marriage, went down to the town for every lying-in. Ninian, who had his horses to sell, took her in on the stage three weeks before the date. Minnie Putnam, who kept the house, gave up her best bed and was heard to say that a Thorne baby would be a great deal of trouble and a great deal of fun. The child, who arrived on a cold night in January with a great deal of dark hair and no visible surprise, was taken back to the farm in a hamper at three weeks and grew up on the stony hillside, among the horses and the inn guests, with a mother in the kitchen and a father on the porch. She was a quiet child. Her sister Emma, who was born two years later, was the quick, restless one, who followed her father about with a stick. Effie stayed in the kitchen. She learned early that her mother's real craft was not cooking but observation, and that a woman who fed a houseful of drovers learned a great deal about their chests, stomachs and tempers. She learned to tell from a man's colour, the way he held a spoon and the smell of his coat what was the matter with him. She was given charge of the herb shelf in the pantry at eight, and at eleven she was making her own syrups. She had no formal training. She had an old copy of Culpeper, a cookbook with a torn cover and a neighbour's widow, a stern, small woman of eighty who had been a midwife and a root-doctor in the hills before the war of 1812, and who taught her, between pipes, which plants to gather at which moon and how to wait for the dew to dry. It was the widow who found out, in her own way, what the Thornes were. She was a sharp-eyed woman, and she had seen a good many odd things in the hills, and when she asked Effie, one afternoon in the autumn of 1858, why her father had so many locks, the girl told her. She was fifteen. The widow said that she had thought as much. She said that a man who stands on a porch in the mist every evening is not looking at the view. She added, without any fuss, that a household of that kind would need a great deal of comfrey. It did. The Ledger's hunters in the hills, who were mostly men of her father's age with a great many old hurts, came to the farm with a steady stream of bruises, strains, cuts, chills and sleeplessness, and she supplied them. She made a salve of comfrey and beeswax that healed a bitten hand in a week. She made a bitter tea for the ague that they took, each spring, in the wet hollows, and a poultice of plantain for a wound that had gone bad. She had a particular remedy, worked out by trial, for the burns that a hunter gets when a bundle of silver shot goes wrong in the pocket, and she had another, more difficult, for the shaking hands and broken sleep that followed a hunt that had gone badly. It was made of valerian and skullcap, and it was always in demand. She never asked what the hunt had been. She asked how long since he had slept. The war brought the work indoors. In the summers of 1862 and 1863, when Morgan's cavalry and the Union patrols swept across the hills by turns, the farm had a number of wounded men left behind, and her mother's inn became a hospital. Effie, who was nineteen, nursed them. She did not ask whether a man was gray or blue, and she told her mother, who had said the same, that it was a great deal easier to bandage a man who was not being asked questions. She learned that most of medicine was cleanliness, and that most of the rest was keeping a frightened man still long enough for the fever to break. She began to sell, in the year after the war. She took a stall at the Lexington market, in the row by the courthouse, on the first Saturday of each month, and stood there behind a table covered in a blue cloth, with bundles, jars and paper twists, and a pair of brass scales. It was an immediate success. The people of Lexington, who had a fair share of ailments and no great faith in doctors, bought her tisanes, her cough syrups, her lavender bags and her salve for chapped hands, and within three years she had a regular trade, and within ten a small room at the back of a Short Street shop, where a woman could sit for a consultation. She took her fee in coin and in kind. She never charged a hunter. She never married. The family tells two stories about this, and they do not agree. One is that she had a suitor in the sixties, a horse dealer from Paris, who asked her twice and was refused twice, on the ground that she could not leave the garden. The other is that she had turned down the suitor, and several others, because she had seen in her mother's kitchen what it was to keep house for a hunter, and had decided that she would rather keep a garden. She said, when asked, that a woman who had a hillside to look after had no need of a husband. She was not unhappy. She was a cheerful, practical, rather untidy woman, with a great deal of soil under her nails and a humming habit, and she was surrounded by people who needed her. Her younger sister, Emma Thorne Faulkner, who was called to the work in 1877, was the great love of her life. They were an odd pair, the dark restless huntress and the fair placid herbalist, and they quarrelled, as sisters will, about small matters and never about large. It was Effie who stitched Emma's wounds, brewed the tea before each hunt and sat on the steps of the farmhouse, with a lamp, on the nights when she was out. It was Emma who brought her the roots of a dozen plants that she had found on her trips, and who was, the family said, the only person in the world to whom she ever deferred. Their father died in 1878, and their mother in 1890. Effie, who was by then forty-seven, moved into a small cottage that she had built at the foot of the garden, near the spring, and lived there alone for the last nine years of her life, with a cat, a rocking chair and a great many bundles of drying plants hanging from the ceiling. The farm passed to Emma. She went up the hill to the big house every Sunday to eat dinner and to fight, amicably, about the state of the barn. She found the lump in the winter of 1897. She knew, as a herbalist, exactly what it was, and she said so to no one for six months. When she did, she told Emma at the kitchen table, and Emma, who did not cry, put down her fork. There was nothing to be done, and she knew it. She made her own remedies, with some care, for the pain, and set about putting her garden in order. She wrote out, in a large exercise book, the whole of her receipts, bed by bed and ailment by ailment, and left it to her sister. She died in the spring of 1899, of cancer, at fifty-six, in the cottage by the spring, with the windows open to the smell of the garden, and was buried on the hill above the house. Emma followed her in the autumn, in a fire that was set in the hope of drawing her out, and was buried beside her. The exercise book passed to a cousin of the Ledger and remained in use in the Kentucky branch of the Ledger for another forty years. Effie Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the herbalist of the blue stall, the sister who kept the hunters well. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers of the Red Ledger, the women and men who grew and ground and steeped the plants that mended the people who did the hunting, and who asked of each hunter who came to the garden gate nothing more than how long it was since he had slept.