Ninian Thorne

Soldier slayer of House of Thorne, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Fallow Warden. Craft: Mist Walking.

Ninian Thorne was born in 1815 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived sixty-three years as a riverman, a farmer and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book knows him as The Fallow Warden, a name that joins the colour of the dry pasture and the office of the man who keeps a gate, and describes a hunter who kept watch on quiet ground. He was a Soldier, a hunter who fought in company and under orders, and his craft was Mist Walking, the moving through fog, river-damp and night vapour without being seen. He was the son of the riverboat pilot and slayer Murdoch Thorne, The Slow Crook, and he trained under him. He married Effie Faulkner in 1840, raised two daughters, Effie Thorne and Emma Thorne Faulkner, the second of whom became a slayer, and died in 1878 of heart failure, at sixty-three, in the Kentucky hills where he had farmed for more than forty years. His father, Murdoch Thorne, born in 1790 and dead in 1847, was a river pilot of the Kentucky and the Ohio, a tall, lean, unhurried man who carried a long curved hunting staff and worked with hounds. The papers do not name his mother, and the family did not discuss it. Ninian was born in a house on the edge of Lexington, in the heart of the bluegrass horse country, and was carried to the river within a week, in a basket, on his father's keelboat, because there was nobody else to keep him. He was raised on the water. He was put ashore at winter quarters, at the Lexington house of a cousin, to be schooled, and was taken aboard again in spring, and he grew up with a double life, in which half the year was a matter of sums and catechism and the other half was mud, current and the smell of hemp. It gave him a very particular relationship to mist. The rivers of the Ohio valley, in spring and autumn, are subject to heavy fog, which forms on the water at dawn and dusk and lies on it in banks so dense that a boat cannot see its own bow. Murdoch Thorne, who piloted in it all his life, had a theory that a pilot who could not be afraid of fog was the only kind worth employing. He took the boy out in it. He would stand him on the bow of the keelboat, at five in the morning, with a pole in his hands, in a bank so white that the water could not be seen, and tell him to take soundings. The child did. He said later that it was the nearest thing to being invisible that he had ever experienced. One was in a world of one's own, a grey room without walls, in which a noise carried very far and a figure could be a dozen yards away and quite unseen. His calling came in 1832, at seventeen, when a bell-ringer failed to come down from a tower. It was at the little church at the edge of Lexington, in the autumn, at the close of the Sunday evening service. The congregation had gone out. The sexton, a dry old man, had gone up to the belfry to see why the bell was still ringing, and had not come down. Ninian, who was in the porch, waiting for his father, heard the rope go on and on, in a slow, regular, patient peal, and saw, looking up, that the bell was moving but that its clapper was not sounding. The tower was shrouded in a pale, low, curling mist, which had no business to be there on a clear night, and out of which, as he watched, the bell-rope came down, taut, and was let go. It was not a wind. He went up. He did not know why. He took the lantern from its hook and went up the stair, alone, at seventeen, into a mist that grew thicker at every step, and reached the belfry at the top. The sexton was lying on the boards with his hands folded. The bell was swinging. There was a figure in the mist, at the far end, its back to him, and he was close enough to touch it before it turned round. He stood perfectly still. He had, he said later, simply stopped being afraid, in the way that a man can stop being cold. The figure looked at him, and considered him, and stepped past, into the wall. It was Murdoch who found him, an hour later, sitting on the stair, with the lantern beside him, calmly looking at the dark. The old man took in the whole scene in a single look. He said that he supposed it had come at last. He took his son home, and sat him down by the fire, and told him the truth about the Thornes, from the border towers to the Kentucky knobs. Mist Walking, as he made it, was a craft of the damp. A Thorne tradition held that a vampire moves most freely in fog, because the fog shields it from the sun, and that a hunter therefore ought to learn to move in fog too. Ninian learned. He learned to walk in a bank of mist without a light, by sound and by the feel of the ground, to read the direction of a breeze from the shift of a vapour, to tell a living thing from a dead one by the way it disturbed the haze. He learned to be quiet. He also learned to be still, which is harder, and which he practised for hours, in a foggy meadow, with a stick in his hand, waiting. He was an exceptional stalker. He could walk to within arm's length of a thing that was looking straight at him, in a mist, and not be seen. The Warden in his alias was the watchman. He was made a warden of the Thorne hounds by his father, a sort of steward, and he kept the kennel and the gate of the family's holding in the hills. It was an honour, and it was a chore. He kept both, for thirty years, without complaint. His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, and a dark wool cloak, which he said held the damp better than any other. He left the river at twenty. His father, who was getting older, had bought a hill farm in the eastern part of the state, near the headwaters of the Kentucky River, on land that had been in the Thorne family since the first settlers, and he gave the farm to his son. It was a stony, steep, difficult place, but it had good grass, a clear spring, and a view of a great many hills, and Ninian, who had had enough of the water, took to it. He raised horses, which were the pride of the country, and sold them at the Lexington sales, and made a fair living. He kept a few hounds. He kept a pair of rifles behind the door. He was a lean, sandy-haired, dry-humoured, taciturn man, who said little and saw a great deal, and who spent his evenings, in the long autumn dusks, standing on the porch, looking at the mist come up in the valley. It was on a trip to the Lexington sales, in the autumn of 1839, that he took a room at Effie Faulkner's boarding house, a place on Short Street where the Putnam kin kept an inn, and where she had been in charge of the kitchen for some years. He was twenty-four. He said nothing for three days. On the third evening she asked him whether the food was not to his taste. He said that it was the best he had eaten, and that he was watching the door. She said that it was the most honest thing that a man had said to her at table. They were married in 1840, and his father, then fifty, came down from the river to the wedding and was seen to smile. She moved with him to the hill farm, and set up, in addition to her household, a small inn for drovers, which soon became a known stopping place on the Lexington road. Their daughters were born there. Effie Thorne was born in 1843 and lived until 1899, and did not hunt. Emma Thorne Faulkner was born in 1845 and lived until 1899, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, the first woman of the Thornes in a hundred years to be called. Ninian taught her the mist. She was said to be better at it than he was. His father's death in 1847, in a fall from a roof during a chase, left him the head of the family's Kentucky branch. He took up the office without enthusiasm. He held, in the hills, a number of meetings of the Thornes and the Ledger's cousins, in the big kitchen of the farmhouse, at which the hunts of the coming year were planned, and he presided over them with a gruff courtesy. He was respected. He was also, in a dry way, well liked. During the Civil War, the hills were a border country, raided by both sides, and he and his wife, who fed everyone, were left alone. He took his rifle to the gate on a number of nights and stood in the fog. He was forty-six when it began and fifty when it ended. He died in 1878, at sixty-three, of heart failure, after a winter hunt on the ridge behind the house. He had gone out before dawn, in a thick mist, to look at a thing in the pasture, and was found at noon, sitting against a fence post, with his hands on his knees, and a quiet, satisfied look. Ninian Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The Fallow Warden, the horse farmer of the Kentucky hills, the watcher in the fog. In the Slayerverse he stands for the hunters of the border houses who learned to walk in the mist, and who held their ground, in the grey hour before the dawn, so that others could sleep.