Heather Thorne

Mercenary slayer of House of Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Iron Crook. Craft: Mist Walking.

Heather Thorne arrived in Yorkshire with a needle case, a long rifle and a border accent that forty years of Yorkshire winters never entirely sanded away. Born in 1668 at Alnwick in Northumberland, she was a dressmaker by trade and, from 1700, a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne, the family of Northumbrian border reivers and later Appalachian mountain hunters whose hunters had ridden the marches for centuries. She married into the Proctor circle in 1697, raised two sons in a coaching town on the Great North Road, and became known to the Proctor ledgers as The Iron Crook, a name that fit both the hook of her walking stick and the unbending line of her character. Alnwick in her childhood was a grey stone town under the walls of the Percy castle, a place of drovers, lead dealers and horse fairs, where the memory of the old border wars was as strong as the smell of peat smoke. The marches had been quieter since the Union of the Crowns, but the old reiving families still spoke of the days when a man's wealth lay in cattle that could be driven off in a night. The Thornes had been among the reivers, and after the borders were pacified their hunters turned to the older enemy, tracking what came down from the fells at night. Heather was born into a household that talked of both. Her father is not recorded in the family papers; the Thorne women of her generation kept their own names, and Heather took her mother's, a fact the family accepted without comment. Her mother, Catriona Thorne, born in 1631, was a spinster teacher who ran a small school for girls in a house near the Bondgate, teaching letters, sums and plain sewing to the daughters of tradesmen and small farmers. She was also a vampire slayer, entered in the ledgers as The Fallow Anvil, a phrase that captured her stillness between hunts and her hardness in them. Catriona was tall, spare and stern, with a border voice that cut through a schoolroom. She taught Heather her letters by the Bible and her arithmetic by the reckoning of cattle, and by the time the girl was ten she could read a moorland by the shape of its grass. Heather was an only child, and the school was the whole of her world: benches, slates, the smell of chalk and wet wool, and a long cupboard at the back of the room that held, behind the primers, a hooded lantern and a set of silver-cast shot. She learned the needle as a trade, since a dressmaker's skills could be practised anywhere and always found custom. At fifteen she was apprenticed to a mantua-maker in Alnwick, and she became fast, neat and precise, with a gift for the cut of a sleeve and the hang of a skirt. The work suited her secret purposes. A dressmaker was admitted to houses of every rank, saw the inside of bedrooms and the arrangement of households, and heard the gossip of servants, and Heather learned in this way to notice which house was uneasy, which family had a child who slept by day, and which door had been freshly barred. Her mother listened to these reports and said nothing, and only years later did Heather understand that she had been trained from the beginning. In 1697 she married Joseph Proctor Lister, a smith of twenty-four, born in 1673, and moved to Yorkshire with him. He was a broad, quiet, patient man whose Proctor blood came through his mother, the surname having passed through the women of that line, and he had set up a forge in a coaching town on the Great North Road, where the horses of the mail and the stage coach were shod and where travellers stopped for a day's rest. He had met Heather when he travelled north to buy iron, and he courted her with a wrought-iron thimble he made for her himself. The wedding was held in Alnwick, and the Thorne women who attended were noticeably better armed than the bride's mother had let on. They settled in a house beside the forge, with a lean-to for Heather's dressmaking and a hearth that never went cold. The children came quickly. Richard Lister was born in 1699, and Ezekiel Lister in 1700, a year that also changed his mother's life. The coaching town had a night watch, an ageing pair of constables who walked the streets with lanterns, and in the autumn of 1700 they turned up the same corpse three mornings running: a carrier found dead at the roadside, moved, found again in a different place, and finally left where the watch could not miss it. The town was alarmed. Heather, who had heard her mother's old stories and seen the mark on the body, understood what she was looking at, and the understanding arrived as a calling. She was thirty-two, with a baby in the cradle. She wrote to Catriona by the next post, and her mother came south, and for a winter the two women hunted together in the fog off the river, teaching Heather in the dark what Catriona had spent forty years learning. The craft she developed was Mist Walking, the knack of moving unseen through fog, river-smoke and the haze of the moor: a way of holding oneself so that a watching predator lost the outline, with wet wool and grey cloth and a slow, sliding step that left no sound. It suited a dressmaker, who knew which fabric muffled sound and which caught light. Her weapon was the long rifle, a Border piece with a heavy barrel, loaded with silver-cast shot; she fired seldom, but she was a formidable shot, and it was said that she could hit a lantern at two hundred paces. Her rank among the hunters was Mercenary: she took the hunts that others would not take, and she took a fee, since a blacksmith's household needed its bread. Her hooked stick, which gave her the name The Iron Crook, was Joseph's work, forged from a wagon axle. She hunted along the coaching roads for forty years, and her tallies in the White Ledger were among the steadiest of her generation. She gave the Faulkners of Lancashire no trouble and no quarter, and she recorded the Rivalry as she found it: a matter of ledger entries, letters and the occasional sniff at a rival's arithmetic. When the first Jacobite rising of 1715 sent Highland and border horsemen along the roads, she was forty-seven and found the coaching trade thrown into confusion; she took two vampires in that autumn who had used the chaos to feed. She noticed that armies and outlaws made good cover, and she said as much in her entry. Her elder son Richard Lister, who lived from 1699 to 1761, took the calling and hunted, in his turn, with his mother's rifle. Ezekiel Lister, who lived from 1700 to 1763, did not, and the ledger records only that he kept the forge with his father. Joseph Proctor Lister died in 1750, ten years after Heather, at seventy-seven. Heather Thorne died in 1740, aged seventy-two, of a fever caught on a wet night's watch, and she was buried in the churchyard in the coaching town where she had lived for forty-three years. The Slayerverse remembers her as the border woman who carried the House of Thorne into Yorkshire, married it to the Proctor line, and left behind a hunter, a smith and a rifle.