Peter Thorne

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Peter Thorne was born in 1641 at Ormskirk, Lancashire, a small market town on the flat mossland north of Liverpool, best known in his boyhood for its gingerbread, its Thursday market and the great church whose tower and steeple stood side by side, said in the district to have been built for two sisters who quarrelled. He was the only child of Roland Thorne, the town's schoolmaster, and Heloise Faulkner, a weaver. He was the lone surviving fruit of what had been a hopeful marriage, and he grew up in a house that expected a great deal of him and had very little else to expect from. The Thornes came from the north, and the family remembered it. They were of the House of Thorne, an old line of Northumbrian border reivers who had ridden on both sides of the Cheviots for generations before the Union of the Crowns made raiding a hanging matter and drove the surviving families to find honest work. Some of them went south to the schools and the pulpits, some went to the Irish plantations, and a branch would in time go west into the Appalachians as mountain hunters. Roland was a scholar of the first kind. He kept a stiff back and a border burr that never softened, taught Latin grammar and Cocker's arithmetic to the sons of Ormskirk's tradesmen, and told the boys, when they misbehaved, that their ancestors would have taken a cudgel to them and thrown in a cow. The house of Thorne had once hunted things in the night as well as cattle, and though Roland did not wear it on his sleeve, he had a leather-bound account of the old Thorne watches that he read to his son at intervals. His mother's side was the Faulkner side. Heloise Faulkner was a weaver of the Lancashire hand-loom trade, spinning and weaving fustian and linen mixtures in the front room of the schoolmaster's house, and it was her blood that placed Peter in the Red Ledger's circle. She was no slayer and had grown up on the fringe of one. She carried the tale of Hugh Faulkner, of the ledger of 1455 and the Wars of the Roses, and of the Guest who got away at Towton in 1461, and she told it to Peter as a fireside story rather than a duty. Between his father's border ghosts and his mother's Lancastrian grievances the boy was raised to know that the world had darker corners than the catechism admitted, and to leave those corners to others. The Civil War had ended when he was still a child, and Ormskirk had been Royalist ground, with the Earl of Derby's own house at Lathom a few miles off and its siege a recent memory. The Commonwealth years laid a hard hand on the market, and when the Restoration came in 1660 the town celebrated with bonfires and a great deal of drink. Peter, then nineteen, had by that time gone into trade. He had been sent to a chandler in the town, an old friend of his father's, to be bound apprentice for seven years, and he learned the making of candles the slow way, rendering mutton tallow in the copper, dipping wicks of twisted cotton over and over into the fat until the candle grew to the size wanted, and moulding the better sort in tin tubes for the gentry. It was a smelly, greasy, warm and useful trade, and no house in Lancashire could do without its candles in winter, when the dark came down at four. In 1665, the great plague year, Peter Thorne lost both his parents. Roland Thorne and Heloise died in the same season, within weeks of each other, and the parish register recorded both burials in one column. The cause was never firmly known. The plague itself had scarcely reached Ormskirk, though the whole district lived in fear of it, and the family said only that a hard summer and an autumn sickness had taken them together. Peter was twenty-four, out of his apprenticeship, and suddenly the head of a household of one. He sold the schoolhouse furniture and kept the books, the border chronicle, and his mother's loom, which he could never bring himself to sell. Afterwards he set up on his own as a chandler in a narrow shop off the market place, with a copper in the back yard and a room above. He was a lean, dark, serious young man with his father's stoop and his mother's steady hands, and he became known for candles that burned clean and did not gutter, which was the highest praise in the trade. He made rushlights for the poor, dips for the middling and wax for the church, and he was scrupulous about weight in an age when many chandlers were not. He was also, though the parish never knew it, a quiet friend of the Faulkner hunters. He supplied candles by the gross to men and women who went out at night, and he made a special taper of beeswax and a little rosin that gave a bright, steady flame in wind, which they called by his name. He never wanted more from the tally than that, and he never asked to see the Red Ledger. He never married. There was a widow at Aughton he was thought to be courting, and a schoolmaster's daughter at Ormskirk who was rumoured to have waited for him, but nothing came of either, and neighbours put it down to the shop. He worked from before dawn until well past dark, boiled and dipped all week, and went to church on Sundays in a black coat that had been his father's. His one indulgence was a small collection of books he had inherited, a Latin grammar, a battered Bible, a Camden's Britannia and the leather account of the Thorne watches, and he read them by his own candles in the evening, slowly, with his lips moving. The cost of that life showed early. By his mid-thirties Peter looked like a man of sixty, grey in the beard, hollow in the chest, his hands scarred by hot fat and his eyes reddened by years of smoke and tallow fumes. The chandlers' trade was hard on the lungs, and the copper in the yard gave off an odour that clung to him even in church. He grew slow and short of breath, and his neighbours began to say that he was ageing before his time. When he died in 1680, aged thirty-nine, the curate wrote the cause in the register as old age, which was a phrase a clerk might use of a man worn thin by work, and which, to the town of Ormskirk, seemed hardly a stretch for someone who had grown old so young. He left no children and no will worth the name, only his tools, his books and his shop, and the shop passed to a journeyman who had worked for him for eight years and kept the name over the door for decades. The border chronicle went to a cousin of his father's in the north, and his mother's loom, according to a later Faulkner family note, went to a cadet branch in Bolton, where it was still used a century afterwards. The Red Ledger has no entry for Peter, which is exactly as he wanted it. In the wider Slayerverse he is remembered among the families as one of the quiet suppliers, the man of the tapers, whose light held steady for the hunters of the moss and whose own life burned down early in the same way that his candles did.