Wat Thorne

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

Wat Thorne, called The Winter Otter in the ledgers, was born in 1706 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne and a blacksmith by trade. He never joined the Faulkners or the Proctors himself; his place in their story is that of a father. His daughter Isobel Thorne, born in 1731, married Benjamin Proctor in 1754 and carried the Thorne name of caution, dogs and long guns into the White Ledger's line. Wat is therefore a minor figure in the Proctor record, but the House of Thorne kept a fuller account of him than the Proctors did, and it shows a hard, methodical man who spent his life between a forge and a river. The Thornes were border people. Before they were Virginians they were reivers of the Northumbrian marches, the raiding families of the Cheviot country who lived by cattle, feud and a cool disregard for whichever crown claimed the land. Those who came to be slayers among them learned that the same country that hid a cattle thief hid other things, and the House took up the older hunt with the same skills. Their ways were the ways of the moss trooper: night riding, sure knowledge of ground, a tolerance for cold and a distrust of officials. When the family crossed the Atlantic in the generations before Wat's birth, it carried those habits to the tidewater and then up toward the Blue Ridge, and in time became mountain hunters, at home in hollows and on ridgelines where the colony's law rarely reached. Fredericksburg, where Wat was born, was a brand new place. The town was laid out in 1728, but the country round it was already a working landscape of tobacco warehouses, ferries and forges, and a boy born there in 1706 would have known it as a river settlement on the Rappahannock at the falls, where goods came down from the frontier and ships took them out. He grew up among iron. Virginia's ironworks had begun in earnest a generation earlier, and the Rappahannock country needed farriers, wheel-tyre men, nailers and smiths of every description. Wat was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a teenager, and in the trade he found what he was good at: heat, patience, a feel for how much force a piece of metal would take. He learned to shoe horses, to weld a broken axle-tree, to draw out a plough-point and to make a chain that would not fail. By his twenties he had a forge of his own. The forge shaped him in more ways than one. He was a broad man with scarred forearms and a slow way of speaking, and he was, by every account, gentle with animals. His hounds were his passion, and he kept a pack of lean, deep-chested dogs bred from stock his family had brought from the border, which he trained to follow a scent through snow, water and woodsmoke. The neighbours knew him as a good farrier who charged fairly. They did not know that the dogs were being trained for a purpose other than the deer hunt. His daughter Isobel, born in 1731, grew up in the noise and heat of the forge, and in later years told her own children that she had learned to walk holding on to a hound's ruff. In time the family moved west, away from the tidewater tobacco and up into the Shenandoah Valley, the great trough of limestone farmland between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, where the wagon road ran south from Pennsylvania and settlers from the German and Scots-Irish communities were filling the land. There was work for a smith there, too, in the small farms and mills, and there was also, as Wat found, a good deal of ground on which the old Thorne trade might be practised without observers. He set up a smithy near a ford on one of the Shenandoah's tributaries. The road came down to the water there, and travellers crossed on horseback, on foot or by wagon, and stopped at his forge for a shoe, a hoop or a hinge. His calling came in 1740, when he was thirty-four, beside that river ford. A traveller who had come down the road at dusk waded into the water, stopped in the middle of it, and failed to leave it; he stood in the stream as though the far bank were a wall. Wat, who had been watching from the smithy door, noticed that the man cast no reflection and that the dogs would not enter the water. It was the most frightening moment of his life, and he knew at once what it meant, because the old Thorne stories were suddenly no longer stories. He took his long rifle and the silver-cast shot he had made up in the forge from a melted-down spoon and a scrap of coin, and he waited on the bank until whatever it was gave way. The vampire did not survive the night. From that year he worked as a slayer of the Soldier archetype, disciplined and methodical, holding ground rather than chasing it, and his particular craft was Hound Handling. He used his dogs to find lairs, to flush prey from cover and to warn him of danger, and he trained new hounds on the scent of the undead until they would go where a man would not. His rifle was a Pennsylvania-style long gun with a long barrel, and his shot was cast in the forge. The name The Winter Otter came from a winter hunt, in which he followed a quarry across the frozen river, sliding on the ice with his dogs, and came out on the far side while the creature broke through. He was careful and never boastful, and he recorded his tallies in the Thorne manner: a short notch on the underside of the forge lintel for each one. His last decade was a busy one. The mountain hunters of the House kept in touch with one another by letter and by travelling smiths and drovers, and Wat was known in the valley as a man to see if something was wrong on the ridge. He watched his daughter grow into a self-possessed young woman who could read a track as well as he could, though she was never called and never carried a rifle in the ledgers' sense. Isobel lived to 1804. He did not live to see her marry into the Proctor line, for he died in 1750, four years before the wedding, in a fire set to draw him out. Something wanted the smith gone, and the forge was burned around him, with the hounds barking in the dark; he was forty-four. It was a tactic the House had feared, and the Thornes never forgot it. Wat Thorne is remembered in the House of Thorne as a man who held a ford. His daughter took the long-gun tradition and the hounds into the household of Benjamin Proctor, and the White Ledger gained from that marriage a steadier sense of ground and a taste for dogs that lingered through later generations. The Slayerverse counts him among the minor founders of the Proctor line's frontier skills, a smith whose fire ended him and whose habits outlasted him.