Hector Thorne

Member of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Hector Thorne was born in 1553 at Hexham, Northumberland, on the south bank of the Tyne, where the great priory church stood over the market place and the hills of the Debatable border country rolled off to the north. He belonged to the House of Thorne, the border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, a clan that had ridden, raided and hunted across the moors between England and Scotland for generations and would later carry its skills into the mountains of Appalachia. By the time of his birth the reiving families were caught between two crowns and had grown used to taking their living from whichever side of the border seemed weakest. His own household lived more quietly than the fierce cousins in Redesdale and Tynedale. His father held a small piece of land near Hexham and a share in the river crossing, and Hector's earliest memory was of the ferry rope creaking on its pulleys in the dawn mist. The Tyne at Hexham was a fast, treacherous river, wide in summer and a torrent after rain. Bridges were few, and the flood of the previous century had taken the old one, so a flat-bottomed boat drawn along a guide rope was the ordinary way to cross. Hector learned to handle the ferry as a boy, hauling on the rope hand over hand, judging the current by the colour of the water and the set of the wind. He carried packmen, drovers with black cattle from the Scottish side, priests in disguise and constables in pursuit. He learned the trick of taking no side in any dispute, and he developed the border habit of remembering everything a passenger said and repeating none of it. By eighteen he was the master of the crossing and had a reputation for honest fares and a cool temper. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 brought armed men to the river when Hector was sixteen. The riders of Northumberland and Westmorland were said to be moving south, and later that winter the queen's troops came north to hunt the survivors, and both parties wanted to cross the Tyne. He ferried whoever offered coin and asked no questions, and when a wounded rebel begged to be taken over at night, he did it for nothing, remembering how his family's own reiving relatives had once needed hidden crossings. It was a dangerous kindness and it might have cost him his life if anyone had reported it. Nobody did. The episode was recalled in the Thorne family as an early example of what they called the ferryman's rule: that a boat belongs to the river, not to the men who sit in it. His people also hunted, though Hector did not. The Thornes knew of the vampires who slipped across the border in the wake of the reivers' raids, following the smell of blood and fear from steading to burned steading, and the family's slayers took them on the moors with stakes cut from hawthorn and with matchlocks when powder was dear enough to spare. Hector saw his cousins go out and come back, and he understood that his part was to carry them. On more than one night in his life he took a hunter over the river in the dark with a wrapped bundle of tools and no lantern, waited on the far bank in a cold mist for hours and brought the same person back before dawn, sometimes carrying a body. He learned to read the signs when a crossing had gone wrong and to say nothing about it. That silence was the House of Thorne's most useful gift. He did not marry into the reiving families, whose women were formidable but whose feuds were endless, and instead married a woman whose name the family papers do not record, a widow's daughter from a Tyneside village. Their only child, Alastair Thorne, was born in 1586, in the year that Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in the Babington plot, when the border was full of alarms. The boy grew up on the riverbank and learned to handle the ferry as his father had, but Hector wanted something else for him. The reiving life was dying under the pressure of the crown's new commissions, after which the old raiding clans were being hanged or transported, and a boy who could read and calculate stood a better chance in the towns to the south. He sent Alastair to a grammar school at Hexham and afterward arranged a place in Yorkshire, in the wool country around York, where the trade of a border carrier could earn a steady living. Hector himself followed some years later. The border was quieter after the union of the crowns in 1603, and the ferry at Hexham, which had been his whole life, could be run by a younger man. Hector was fifty and tired. He moved to Yorkshire and took a small cottage by a river crossing on the Ouse, where he ran a smaller ferry for a modest wage and lived among the guildhalls, wool markets and minster close of a country that seemed to him gentle and slightly soft. He kept his border accent, and the Yorkshiremen teased him for it. He used to sit by the water in the evenings, smoking a clay pipe when tobacco could be had, watching the barges go by and telling anyone who would listen how a real river ran. In 1615 Alastair married Christiana Proctor, a daughter of a Richmond wool factor and a dairywoman, and thereby tied the Thornes into the White Ledger's family. Hector, who was sixty-two, went to the wedding in his best coat and was seated at the high table, an honour he received with more embarrassment than pleasure. He was struck by the fact that the Proctors kept books, a thing no Thorne had ever done, and he said that his own people wrote their reckonings with knives and fire. Yet he saw at once that the Proctors and the Thornes were made of the same material, being people who guarded a border of one kind or another and expected little thanks. He is reported to have told his son that the marriage was a good crossing, and that a man should not turn back halfway across a river. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns wore Hector down. He suffered from a wasting illness for two years, growing thin and quiet, and he died in 1624 at the age of seventy-one, having outlived most of the men he had known on the Tyne. His son buried him in a Yorkshire churchyard, far from the moors, and put a river stone on the grave. The Thorne records remember Hector as a minor figure, a man who never carried a stake but who understood the value of a boat and a closed mouth. In the Slayerverse he is treated as the founder of a quiet tradition within the family: that a house could take part in the great contest of the ledgers not only by hunting but by carrying others safely to the far bank.