Stuart Thorne was born in 1615 at Kielder, in the far north of Northumberland, in a country of bog, heather and forest where the border with Scotland ran through the hills like a rumour. His people were the Thornes, a house of border reivers whose ancestors had raided across the marches and hunted the things that came out of the night, and who had, since the union of the crowns in 1603, turned their skills to a more lawful sort of hunting. The reiving days were officially over. But the old habits lingered in the valleys of the North Tyne and the Rede: the stone bastle house with its ground floor for cattle, the habit of sleeping with a knife under the pillow, and the long, quiet knowledge of the hills that a Thorne child took in with his oatmeal.
His mother, Ailsa Thorne, born in 1593, was a shopkeeper's wife, and she was also a vampire slayer, known in the border families as The Bitter Stave. The name came from her chosen weapon, a length of blackthorn cut from the hedge behind the shop and cured in vinegar until it turned the colour of old tea, and from a tongue so sharp that the customers at the counter had learned to pay in full and leave quickly. The records give no father for Stuart and no brothers or sisters, and the family accepted that he had been raised by Ailsa alone, in the room above the shop, among the sacks of oats, the tallow candles and the bundles of horn spoons that made up the stock. It was a solitary childhood, and it made him careful.
He learned the border craft from his mother in the evenings, after the shop was shut. She taught him to walk over dry bracken without a sound, to read weather from the flight of curlews, and to tell from the set of a sheep's ears that something was moving in the next glen. She did not call him to the slaying. The calling, it seems, passed him by, and the ledgers record no reason, but Ailsa never treated him as anything less than a Thorne. She taught him what she could, and he took it with the seriousness of a boy who knew that his mother's knowledge was the only inheritance he was going to get. By his late teens he was a tall, spare, weathered young man with a habit of looking over his shoulder in a room, and a reputation among the Kielder farmers as the person to fetch when a cow went missing.
In the middle 1630s he travelled south. The reasons the family gave were practical: land in Northumberland was scarce, the Thornes were many, and a yeoman without a farm could do better in Lancashire, where the hill grazing was good and the leases were cheap. Behind that lay another reason, which was that the Thornes and the Faulkners had exchanged messages for years, and a Thorne cousin had spoken warmly of the Red Ledger's people. Stuart took a lease on a hill farm above Whalley, put up a sheepfold and a barn, and became, to the surprise of nobody who knew him, an admirable yeoman: sober, fair-dealing, unhurried and difficult to fool.
He met Millicent Faulkner in Whalley. She was a dressmaker, three years older than he, the daughter of Nicholas Faulkner, the man the slayers called the Pendle Watcher, and she looked at him across a fitting-room table with a level, assessing expression that he found alarming. He said afterwards that he had faced a bull, a blizzard and the Scots border commissioners and had never felt so thoroughly examined. They married in 1636, when he was twenty-one and she twenty-four, at Whalley parish church. His mother did not travel south for the wedding, which was a long and costly journey, but she sent a wedding gift, a blackthorn staff, and a letter that said in seven words that she was sorry to miss it and that he was to be kind. He was.
Their children were Prudence Faulkner, born in 1637, and Stuart Faulkner, born in 1639, and both took the Faulkner surname, which was the family's custom and to which he raised no objection. He taught them to walk quietly, to read weather and to leave a gate as they had found it, and he never pressed either of them toward the slaying, since he knew from his own history how much a child could bear without it. When the civil wars split the northern gentry and armies began to march through the valley, he kept the farm running and used his border craft in a different way. A man who can walk over moorland without a sound is useful to a village whose neighbours are being raided, and he escorted more than one frightened family up over the tops to a safe farm, guiding them by paths that no soldier's map recorded.
He also went out, quietly, on the Faulkner slayers' business. Not a slayer himself, he served as a guide and a scout, leading hunters over the fells to a sighting, and marking the place with a cairn or a bent hazel. His method was patient and border-bred: he would lie in the heather for hours and watch a farmstead, counting the lights and the comings and goings, and then report exactly what he had seen and nothing more. The Red Ledger's slayers valued him for that reticence, and the ledgers contain a number of entries in which the phrase according to Thorne appears beside a successful hunt. He gave the same unemotional attention to the Yorkshire side when it came. A Proctor courier once lost his way on the fells above Whalley in a February blizzard, and Stuart found him, brought him down, and put him up for a week until he could travel. The courier left with a promise never to forget the debt, and the White Ledger's next message to the Faulkners came with a compliment to the man who kept the moor.
Millicent died in 1663, thrown from a horse, and he grieved her in the way of the border, without speaking of it. He lived on for twenty-five years, working the farm, watching his children grow and their families in turn. Ailsa died in 1659, and he had by then buried both the women who had shaped him. In the great plague year of 1665 he was fifty, and he sat out the summer on the hill above the farm with a shepherd's dog, watching the road.
He died in 1688, at the age of seventy-three. The parish clerk recorded the cause as childbed, a curiously fitting entry for a man who had spent his last weeks helping at a lying-in in a neighbour's house where the fever ran, and who caught it from the bed he had stayed up beside, sitting through the night in the kitchen with the kettle and the door. He was buried at Whalley beside Millicent. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the Thorne who came south with a blackthorn staff and a hunter's silence, and whose quiet tread made him the best friend the Red Ledger never wrote down.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
