Mariota Thorne

Slayer of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

On the Northumbrian side of the Cheviots, where the North Tyne runs out of the hills and the land turns into rough grazing and bracken, there was a saying that a Thorne could be told by her hands, which were always either warm from the milk or cold from the fell. Mariota Thorne, born in 1517 at Bellingham, had both. She was a dairymaid of the House of Thorne, the border reiving family of the Northumbrian marches whose men and women had spent three centuries raiding, defending and burying their neighbours along the line between two kingdoms, and whose descendants would later go into the Appalachians as mountain hunters. Her record in the family papers begins with a milking stool and a churn, and ends, sixty-eight years later, in a lying-in room in Lancashire. Bellingham in her youth was a village of low stone byres and thatched cottages at the edge of Redesdale and Tynedale, the two great valleys of the border reivers, whose inhabitants lived by cattle and by the knowledge that any cattle might be taken. Every substantial house had a bastle, a squat, thick-walled tower with its animals below and its family above, reached by a ladder that could be drawn up. Church bells were rung at night to warn of riders. Men slept with their boots on, and the surnames of the district, Charlton, Robson, Milburn, Thorne, were less names than allegiances. In the Thorne tradition each generation learned to watch the fell after dark and to mark, from the movement of cattle and dogs, when something was coming that was not a raider. Mariota learned that watching from a grandmother whose name the family papers do not preserve. She milked, made butter and pressed cheese in the dairy of a border farmhouse, rising before dawn in the cold and carrying wooden pails across a yard of frozen mud. It was hard, hungry work in a hard, hungry country. Oatmeal, kale and a little salt mutton were the winter fare, ale was thin and the wind was constant. She was tall and long-boned, with hair the colour of dark honey that gave her later name, and her voice, when raised, carried across a field. In her twenties she moved south, as many border women did when the marches were troubled and the northern risings that followed the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 and 1537 had shaken the country around. She found work in the great wool and dairy farms of Lancashire, first on the Ribble, then nearer the moorland edge, on abbey lands that were being sold to new owners. It was a different landscape, wetter and greener, with its walls of grey stone and its church towers, but the habits she brought were the same. Her calling came in 1549, when she was thirty-two. A neighbour, a farmer's wife she had known for several years, was buried on a Thursday after a short illness, and on the Saturday night came back to the farmyard and stood at the gate, asking to be let in. She was perfectly courteous. She would not, however, come indoors without an invitation, and no argument, no plea from her husband, no reassurance about the cold could move her across the threshold. The household stood at the window in a silence that Mariota, watching from an upper room, recognised. It was the same silence she remembered from the bastle at Bellingham, the silence of a house that knows something is outside. She understood at that moment that she knew what it was, and what to do about it, and that she alone in that house did. What she did was to keep watch. This became the craft her family called the Peel-Tower Watch: the discipline of holding a building against a night, from inside, by attention alone. Its rules were those of the border towers. Keep the ladder up. Keep one person awake at each window. Count the hours by the bell, not the dark. Never open to a voice you know. She sat the whole of that night at the upper sill with a matchlock pistol her employer had once kept for hares and a handful of hawthorn stakes cut from the hedge, and toward dawn, when the thing at the gate lost patience and tried the wall, she was ready. It was, by the standards of her later career, an unremarkable kill, but the Thorne cousins to whom she wrote afterward said that she described it as if inspecting a piece of butter for faults. As a vampire slayer she took the alias The Amber Beacon, from her hair and from a lantern of horn and amber she hung out on the farm gate on nights when she knew she would be out on the fell. The Thorne archetype for such a role was the Mercenary: not a soldier for hire in any grand sense, but a hunter who took wages, worked wherever the work was and owed loyalty to a house rather than to a lord. She hired herself to farms and manors, in Lancashire and the Craven country beyond, as a dairymaid by trade and a guard by night, and took shillings for the second as readily as for the first. In the years after 1549 she cleared three vampires from wool farms on the moors above Colne and Clitheroe. She made few friends, since the work does not encourage it, but she came into contact with the Faulkner households of the district, who kept the Red Ledger, and found them careful, well-organised and curiously accommodating of a border woman with a pistol. The middle years of her life were unsettled by the accession of Mary in 1553 and the reversal of the church order, which she observed with the composure of a woman who had lived under three churches in twenty years and expected a fourth. Her private life is only lightly recorded. She never married, or if she did the record is silent; the Thorne papers name no husband. In 1555, when she was thirty-eight, she gave birth to a daughter, Iona Thorne, whom she raised alone in a rented cottage on farm land, teaching the child to milk, to watch and, in time, to hold a stake. Iona would become a slayer herself, and would in 1573 marry Ralph Faulkner, binding the Thorne line to the Lancastrian house of the Red Ledger. Mariota attended that wedding in a borrowed gown, and sat through the feast without touching the ale, as she had never in her life sat down to a meal without keeping one eye on the door. Through the 1560s and 1570s she gradually gave up the farms and the hunting and retired to a cottage near her daughter, still sharp-eyed and still, in the local telling, capable of putting a man on his back with a milking stool. The rising of the northern earls in 1569, which brought soldiery and reprisal to the moors, she watched from her window; the Thorne cousins across the border found themselves once again on the wrong side of a proclamation. She spoke of it seldom. When the young women of her daughter's household asked what she remembered of the marches, she would answer with the tally of who had come home and who had not. Mariota Thorne died in 1585, aged sixty-eight, of childbed. The old woman had been called at night to sit with a kinswoman in her lying-in, taking her place at the bedside and watching the door as she always had, and in the days after the birth she took the fever that followed it. She was buried in the churchyard nearest the farm, leaving no property but the horn lantern, a pistol and a small store of stakes. Descended from no ledger and answerable to none, she is recorded in the Faulkner rolls as the mother of the wife of Ralph Faulkner, and in the Slayerverse as the watchwoman of the Thorne line, the one who taught the house that it is enough, some nights, simply to keep the lamp lit.