Shona Thorne was born in 1633 in Bellingham, Northumberland, a small stone town on the North Tyne where the moors begin and the wind comes off the Cheviots with sleet in it nine months of the year. She was a daughter of the House of Thorne, the border reivers who had ridden the marches for centuries and who, once the Union of the Crowns had ended the old raiding, drifted into shops, farms and quiet trades while keeping their other, older work behind the door. Her father was Ian Thorne, born in 1599, a chandler who made tallow and rush dips and the better wax candles for the gentry, and who kept a low shop near the church with a boiling room behind it. Her mother is not named in the Thorne papers, though they record that she was a hard-working woman with a long memory for the names of the dead, and that she sang at the pot in a Northumbrian dialect that the child never lost.
The shop was Shona's first schoolroom. She grew up among the smells of hot fat and beeswax, learning to dip a wick, to trim a candle and to keep a tally in chalk on the counter, and she learned very early that light was a serious commodity in a country of long nights. Her father was not a slayer, but he was a Thorne, and the shop's stock reflected it: he made an unusual number of tall church candles, and a certain heavy, slow-burning taper that he supplied without comment to cousins from the hill farms who came down at odd hours. The girl noticed that the cousins never asked for the cheap tallow. They wanted candles that would burn from dusk to dawn without guttering, and they paid in coin, not credit.
Her childhood was played out against the civil wars, which came to Northumberland in the form of Scottish armies, unpaid soldiers and a general lack of everything. She was nine when the war began and eighteen when it ended, and in the years between there were winters when the shop sold nothing and the family lived on the last of the salted mutton. Shona learned to sew by necessity: when the money went, her mother took in mending, and the child proved to have a quick, neat hand and an eye for a pattern. By sixteen she was apprenticed to a dressmaker in the town and by twenty she was making gowns for the wives of the local gentry, cutting bodices from a pattern of paper and pins, and finishing sleeves with the small stitches that gentlewomen could not do themselves. It was a good trade for a woman with a steady eye and it suited her exactly.
Her father died in 1658, when she was twenty-five, and the shop passed to a cousin. Shona, who had a small sum from her own work, took the opportunity to travel south. A Thorne kinswoman had married into Lancashire, and there was talk of a dressmaker's business in Clitheroe, under Pendle Hill, where the trade in fine woollens and worsted was flourishing and where a woman with a Northumbrian accent and a needle would find work. She went by the carrier's cart across the moors in the last days of a wet spring, with a trunk of patterns and a bundle of her father's candles, and took rooms above a shop in the market street. She was, by every account, a striking sight: tall, grey-eyed, silent, with a thimble on her finger and a habit of looking at doorways before she looked at faces.
She met Stuart Faulkner, a chandler, over candles, which was perhaps inevitable. He had come into the trade from a yeoman's household and was ten years younger than the men who usually went courting, and he was struck, he later said, by a woman who could tell at a glance whether a wick had been badly cast. They married in 1660, the year the king came back, when the bells were ringing all over the county, and the wedding was a modest affair in the parish church followed by a supper of cold beef and ale. Shona was twenty-seven and Stuart was twenty-one, a difference that the neighbours remarked on and that neither of them ever did. The Thorne cousins who came down from the north for the wedding were noted by the Faulkner side as unusually quiet and unusually well armed, but the ledger says only that the two houses found each other congenial. The Red Ledger cousins on Stuart's side, for their part, soon learned that the new wife was not a person to be trifled with.
Shona did not hunt, and there was never any suggestion that she had a calling. She was not a slayer, and she said so plainly. Yet she was of the Thorne house, and she knew what the Faulkners did, and she made herself useful in the way that her hands allowed. She stitched the leather-lined pockets that held a stake and a pistol charge inside a plain coat. She altered cloaks so that a man could move without the hem catching. She sewed the small hawthorn sprig into the hem of her own children's clothes, as her mother had done for her, and on winter nights she and Stuart worked together in the back room, she at the seams and he at the candle moulds, saying little. Their daughter Mercy Thorne Faulkner was born in 1663 and their son Gervase Thorne Faulkner in 1666, the year of the great fire in London, and the surname pattern of the family, which let a mother's line ride along beside the father's, gave both children the Thorne name as their middle one.
The great plague year of 1665 had come in between the births, and the family remembered it for the way the market emptied and the candles piled up unsold. Shona nursed no one, since the neighbours kept to their doors, but she sewed shrouds when the sexton's wife fell sick, and she learned to soak her hands in vinegar and to leave the stitching on the step. Her children grew up in the Faulkner house at Clitheroe under Pendle Hill, with the castle keep on its limestone crag above the roofs, and they heard the old northern songs from their mother and the family's grim practical instructions from their father. Gervase in particular, a quick-eyed boy, sat at her feet while she worked and asked why she always closed the shutters at dusk. Her answer, according to the family, was that a good house is one where the light is kept on the inside.
She was never strong in the chest, and the northern winters were hard on her. By her late forties she coughed each January, and in 1682 the cough did not lift. She died that winter, aged forty-nine, of the winter cough, a phrase that in seventeenth-century Lancashire covered a great many lung complaints, and she was laid in the churchyard at Clitheroe in frozen ground. Stuart, who was forty-three, kept her workbox unopened on the shelf for years. Mercy, then nineteen, took over the sewing for the family, and Gervase, sixteen, went on to become a vampire slayer in his own right, carrying his mother's Thorne name into the ledger.
She is remembered in the Faulkner and Thorne records as the quiet hand that held the household together, a dressmaker whose seams carried the family's secret trade in their linings. Later generations of the Slayerverse would tell the story of the coat she made for her son, which had eleven pockets and no visible seam, and which was still hanging in a Lancashire attic long after the house had changed hands.
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