Roland Thorne taught the children of a Lancashire hand-loom village to read from a horn-book and a birch rod, and he taught them, when nobody was listening, which doors to bolt after dark. He was born in 1617 at Kielder, in the empty hill country of Northumberland, to Sandy Thorne, a ferryman, and his story is that of a man of the House of Thorne who crossed the Pennines with a satchel of books and left the family's old trade of border raiding behind him, though not the family's older duty.
Kielder in his boyhood was a place of peat smoke, sheep and long memories. The Thornes there had been reivers on the Northumbrian marches, cattle thieves and blackmailers and guides who could take a party across the moss in fog, and in the time of Roland's grandfather the crown's harsh peace had finally begun to bite. Some of the family took to the pulpit or the plough; others took up the ferry crossings on the North Tyne and Liddel Water and made a kind of respectable trade of knowing the crossing places. Sandy Thorne, born in 1595, was one such. He worked a flat-bottomed boat on a rope, carrying drovers, pedlars and the occasional Scots minister, and among the tolls he took he counted the things he saw on the water at night. The family called him the Meek Crook, half in mockery of his stoop and half in respect for the fact that he was a vampire slayer who never raised his voice. Roland grew up hearing the creak of the ferry rope and the low talk of his father with strangers who came to the door after dark.
He was a thin, bookish boy, quick with figures, poor at the sword-play that the older cousins prized. There was no grammar school within a day's walk, but the curate at Falstone took a liking to him and taught him Latin over a winter, and by his early twenties Roland had the qualifications, if not the degree, to keep a school. What he wanted, as he told his father, was a place where nobody would ask him to carry a pistol. Sandy, to the family's surprise, agreed. A schoolmaster, he said, could sit in the middle of a parish and hear everything, and the House of Thorne had always had need of ears.
Roland went south to Lancashire in the middle 1630s and found work as usher to a small grammar school in one of the market towns of the Ribble valley, where hand-loom weavers filled the lanes with the clack of shuttles from every cottage window and the wool and linen trade paid for the church tower and the alehouses alike. It was a place of narrow terraces of stone, of pack-horses on the causeway, of oatcake and buttermilk and Sunday sermons two hours long. He boarded with a weaver's family, and it was in that house that he met Heloise Faulkner, a weaver in her own right, born in 1613, who had inherited her father's loom and the Faulkner talent for silence. She was four years his elder and had refused two offers already. Roland, who liked to say that he had not proposed so much as submitted a translation, married her in 1638.
The Faulkners of the district kept the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian tally begun by Hugh Faulkner in 1455 during the Wars of the Roses, and although Heloise was not a slayer herself she had been brought up to know the ledger and to help the cousins who were. The marriage was, in the family's eyes, an alliance of two hunting houses, and Roland was aware of being looked over by uncles who quietly wondered whether the Thorne who would not fight was worth having. He answered them by keeping a schoolmaster's exact records: which children had missed lessons, which farms had lost livestock, which household had begun to keep the shutters closed by day. He copied these onto slips and passed them to the Faulkner cousins. Within a few years the Lancashire slayers had come to prefer his notes to their own memory.
Their son Peter Thorne was born in 1641, and Roland taught him at his own bench from the age of four. Then the civil wars came to the county. The gentry of Lancashire were split, the Earl of Derby holding for the king, and the cloth towns for the most part leaning to Parliament, and the school, like every school, was disrupted by billeting and by the fear of pressed men. Roland kept it open through some of the worst years by holding lessons in a barn, and he was known to shelter both a Royalist runaway and a Roundhead deserter in the same week without asking either to explain himself. In the ledger's marginal notes it is recorded that during the winter of 1644 a foraging party of unidentified men lodged in the schoolhouse and that after they left three boys in the village sickened strangely. Roland sat up with them for six nights with a lantern and a bundle of salted hawthorn, though he never hunted; he watched, and when the Faulkner cousins came at dawn on the seventh day they found the thing already driven off the threshold by a man in a schoolmaster's gown who refused to leave the door.
He was not a soldier and made no claim to be. What he was, in the Faulkner reckoning, was a keeper of the village's attention, a man who noticed when the numbers were wrong. When the great plague year came to the north in 1665 he closed the school and turned it into a store for oatmeal and coal, and rather than flee he stayed to keep the accounts of the parish relief, writing out lists of who had been fed, who had been visited, and who had not been seen. Those lists, several of which survive in the Red Ledger's appendices, are among the most precise records of a plague-time community that the family holds.
The winter of that year was a hard one. Frost split the stones of the lane, the river froze at the edges, and the parish ran short of fuel. Roland gave his own coal to a neighbouring widow and went cold himself, and he took a chill that settled in his chest and did not lift. He died in 1665, of a hard winter, at the age of forty-eight, only a matter of weeks before Heloise, who died the same year. They were buried on the same day in the same churchyard, and their son Peter, then twenty-four, carried on the teaching in his father's room until his own death in 1680.
The Thornes remember Roland as the one who proved that the House of Thorne's watchfulness could be exercised without a blade. The Faulkners remember him more simply as the schoolmaster who kept their books. In the Slayerverse he is a small but real figure, the archetype of the household ally, the person who does not hunt but without whom the hunters would be blind.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
