Sandy Thorne

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

The reapers of a Lancashire farm were never seen again, and Sandy Thorne became a vampire slayer because he was the one who noticed. It was the harvest of 1628 and he was thirty-three years old, a ferryman with a grown son, and by every ordinary measure a man whose life had already been settled. He was born in 1595 at Kielder in Northumberland, in the upland North Tyne country where the House of Thorne had been riding, raiding and, more recently, farming for longer than anyone bothered to count, and he died in 1642 falling from a roof in the middle of a chase, at forty-seven. The fourteen years in between were, in the family's opinion, the ones that counted. His childhood was that of the border's last generation of reivers' sons. The kingdoms had been united when he was eight, and the raiding stopped in earnest soon after, but the culture did not stop with it. The stone bastles were still standing, the long feuds were still remembered in the hill farms, and old men in Kielder still told the stories of night riding in a way that made small boys want to stay up. Sandy was a mild, stooped child, with a ducked head and a way of speaking softly, so that it was hard to imagine him in the saddle of a border riding. His playmates called him Crook, for the bend in his shoulders, and the name later acquired the modifier Meek, when a slayer of the district looked at him and remarked that he was the most meek and crooked man ever to threaten a vampire. The Meek Crook became his alias, and it suited him. Like so many Thorne men, he turned to water and boats as the old economy failed. He worked as a ferryman, first on the Tyne and later, after he moved south with his family, on the rivers of Lancashire, the Ribble and the Lune among them, where a flat-bottomed boat and a long pole could earn a living carrying carts, drovers and pedlars from bank to bank. A ferryman sees everyone. He knew who crossed at dusk and who never crossed back, and he learned to keep his eyes down and his mouth shut, habits that would serve him well later. He also kept the quiet, methodical temperament of a man who spends his days waiting for a cargo, and it was a temperament that a hunter needs. In 1617, when he was twenty-two, his son Roland Thorne was born. There is no wife in the family papers, and Sandy never spoke of her; the record says only that he raised the boy himself, in a house by the ferry stage, with the help of an aunt and the goodwill of the river-side neighbours. Roland grew up on the water, poling the flat, learning to swim before he could read, and watching his father with the anxious admiration of a boy who has one parent and means to keep him. Roland lived until 1665 and was not called, but he had a strong, gentle nature, and he was the child a man of Sandy's habits could not have failed to love. The Lancashire of those years was a country of hand-loom villages and small market towns, with the great houses of the gentry standing over them and a hard religious argument running through everything. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns had thinned some of the parishes, and a series of poor harvests in the late 1620s left many of the farming families hungry and short-tempered. The prices of oats and barley rose, and the tenant farmers lived close to the edge. It was in this state of strain, with everyone looking to bring in every last sheaf, that the harvest of 1628 came to a district Sandy knew well. The calling came in the fields. He had been ferrying carts of sheaves from an upland farm for several days, when the farmer told him that the last field had not been cut, that the reapers had gone up on Monday to finish it, and that nobody had seen them since. It was a fine, hot week. Sandy walked up in the evening to look, and found the standing barley shining in the low sun and not a sound in it, no sickles, no children gleaning, no dog. The tools lay in the stubble at the field's edge. He said afterwards that he stood there for some time before he understood that what he was looking at was not a mystery but an invitation. Something in the hedge moved. He had a boat pole and a hay knife, and he used both, and it was after that night that he knew what he was, and knew, too, that he had probably known for years. He spent the next week searching a nearby quarry and the old lime-kiln beside it, and what he found there he never described in full. He had no mentor, and no mentor was needed, since the House of Thorne was a family that kept its hunters in the background and its lessons in stories. What he built for himself was a method as odd as he was. He took the ferryman's dogs, the big rough hounds that guarded the landing, and trained them, over a season, to follow a scent that was not a deer's or a fox's. This became his craft, Hound Handling, and it was well suited to a country of river-meadows, drainage ditches and wet woodland, where a man on foot lost a trail in minutes and a good dog held it for hours. Soldiering was in his blood, or he made it so: he drilled himself, kept his hours, and treated each hunt as a small campaign, with a plan and an order of march. He was a flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes man, like most of his house, and the Soldier's archetype was given to him by his kin, who noted the neatness with which he ran a night's work. Fourteen years of hunting followed, in which his reputation grew slowly. He never boasted, and the Meek Crook remained, in the district, a ferryman who spoke little. But other hunters came to know that if a farm went quiet or a barn door hung open in the morning, he was the man to tell. He worked with his dogs alone, mostly, and when Lancashire families of the Faulkner line needed help on the river country they sent to him. He was on good terms with them for a practical reason: his son was to marry into that house. In 1638 Roland married Heloise Faulkner, a daughter of Lancashire, and Sandy watched from the back of the church as his quiet son became part of the Red Ledger's family. He said little at the wedding and drank rather more than usual. The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, were only four years off, and by 1642 they had come to Lancashire in earnest, with skirmishes around Manchester and forced levies in every parish. The chaos gave the vampires cover, as any turmoil does, and Sandy was busy. He died that same year, in the autumn of 1642, in a fall from a roof. He had been chasing something across the thatch and slate of a small market town, with the dogs baying in the street below, and a rotten timber gave way under him. He was forty-seven. Roland brought him home. In the memory of the Slayerverse he remains the meekest and least likely of hunters, and one of the most reliable.