Meg Thorne

Hunter slayer of House of Thorne, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Still Beacon. Craft: Hound Handling.

The ship came ashore on the Northumberland coast in the grey light after a three-day gale in the autumn of 1534, and the girl who found it was not a sailor or a fisherman but a dairymaid. Meg Thorne, twenty-two years old, had walked down from the milking sheds to look at what the storm had left on the beach, and she found a stout coasting vessel lying on her side in the shingle with her sails still set, her hatches battened, her cargo intact and every man of the crew sitting or lying on the deck without a mark on him and without a breath. Nobody in the district would go aboard. Meg went, because the cattle needed the fields cleared, and she came off it with a hawthorn spar in one hand and something at her back that was not yet dead. That was her calling, and it made her a vampire slayer of the Border, and the Faulkners of Lancashire would later enter her in the Red Ledger as The Still Beacon. She had been born in 1512 at Haltwhistle, in Northumberland, a market village on the South Tyne under the line of Hadrian's Wall, in country where the past lay in every field wall. Her family was of the House of Thorne, border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, a clan that had raided across the frontier for generations and, when the raiding ceased to pay, took to hunting the things that raiders had always feared to meet on the moors at night. Her father, Neil Thorne, born in 1477, was a wool-comber, one of the families who cleaned and combed the fleece for the spinners, and he worked at a bench in the front room of a stone bastle house with a barred door and a ground floor for the animals. The records say nothing about her mother, and Meg herself never spoke of her; she was raised in the house by her father and by the women of the wider Thorne kin. The border in Meg's childhood was still an armed society, though the great reiving days were drawing to a close. Every farm was a fortress of sorts, with thick walls, small windows, a stair that could be pulled up, and a peel tower on the hill where the beacon fire was kept ready for the alarm. Hounds were kept, too, not as pets but as instruments. The Border laws allowed a man who had lost cattle to follow the thieves across the line with horn and hound, in the pursuit called the hot trod, and the Thorne kennels bred sleuth-hounds for that purpose, heavy-headed, low-voiced dogs that could hold a scent across a river. Meg was put to the dogs as a small child. She fed them, bedded them, and walked them in the evenings, and by ten she could tell one animal's bark from another at a quarter of a mile. At sixteen she was sent to a dairy at a farm near the coast, kept by a cousin, where she rose in the dark to milk forty cows and learned to make the hard salted cheese of the district. The work suited her, being solitary, physical and outdoors, and she was said to be a silent, watchful girl with a long stride and grey eyes who did not talk when she could nod. It was on this farm that the wrecked ship came ashore. The Thorne cousins, who had been hunting for generations without ever mentioning it to strangers, took her in hand at once. They told her what she had killed and what she was. Within the year she was training with them, learning the stakes and the dogs and the trick of staying still. Her craft was Hound Handling, and it grew out of everything she had learned as a child. She did not fight the creatures directly if she could help it. She sent a pair of lurchers or a single old bloodhound out ahead, tracked by the sound of their bells, and let the dogs run the quarry to a place of her choosing, a bank, a bridge, a gateway where it could be fixed. She said that a hound never lied about a scent and never hurried a hunter. Her gear was a matchlock pistol, a piece that she carried more as a signal than as a weapon, since its flash and crack in the dark drew the dogs and made the quarry turn, and a bundle of hawthorn stakes carried in a leather roll on her back. Her archetype was Hunter, and the ledger notes that she was the only Thorne of her generation to bring her own pack with her when she went abroad. In 1536 she came south. A Thorne cousin had business with drovers who took Border cattle down to the Lancashire markets, and Meg went with them, ostensibly as a dairymaid hired to a farm on the Pendle side of the Ribble, in fact to see the country and to make contact with the Faulkners of Clitheroe, whose reputation as a Lancastrian hunting house had reached the north. The journey took three weeks with the herds, over the fells and across the Aire gap, and she arrived in the very year of the Pilgrimage of Grace, when the district was full of soldiers and the roads were dangerous. She got work at a farm near Clitheroe and began, in the evenings, to explore the hills with her dogs. The Faulkners noticed her within a month, because the local vampires did. She met Maurice Faulkner at the mill on the Ribble, where he worked among the stones and the sacks, a miller's son, quiet and floury and a few years her junior, born in 1518. He was not a slayer, but he was the younger son of Edmund Faulkner, The Flodden Archer, and he was easy in the company of hunters and not afraid of dogs. They courted through the winter of 1536 to 1537. She was twenty-five when they married in 1537 and he was nineteen, a difference that his sister Margery teased him about for the rest of her life. The wedding was held in the parish church at Clitheroe with the Thorne cousins standing on one side and the Faulkners on the other, and the two families got on tolerably well. Her father Neil, who was then sixty, did not attend, but he sent her a set of bells for her hounds. The marriage was happy and short. Sampson Faulkner was born in 1539, and Humphrey Faulkner in 1541, both healthy boys, and Meg raised them in a house near the mill with the dogs asleep in the kitchen. She continued to hunt, at first with Edmund, whose death in 1541 was a blow to her, and afterward alone. Her tally in the Red Ledger runs to some twenty entries across five years, an impressive number, and her dogs were credited with several more. She was careful, and she was liked, and by 1542 she was the acknowledged best tracker in the north of the county. She kept up a cordial correspondence with a Proctor hunter in Preston, exchanging notes about a marsh creature both families were following, and neither would have called it a quarrel. In the autumn of 1542, on a lonely road across the moor between Clitheroe and Gisburn, she was ambushed. She had gone out at dusk to follow a report of a nest in a ruined grange, with two hounds, and the creatures had been waiting for her, more of them than the report had said. The dogs were found in the morning, badly hurt, guarding her body on the roadside. She died in 1542, aged thirty, and Maurice buried her at Clitheroe with her stakes beside her. He did not marry again and lived until 1566, raising his sons with the help of his sister-in-law Alice; Sampson died in 1593 and Humphrey in 1607. In the Slayerverse Meg Thorne stands as the Northumbrian who brought hound-craft to the Faulkners, and the Red Ledger's clerk, closing her page, wrote only that the dogs had come home.