by Catherine Cookson
Thomas Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them bastards. But to alI of them he passed on his mark - a distinctive flash of white hair running to the left temple, and known as the Mallen Streak. It was said in the Northumberland countryside that those who bore the streak seldom reached old age or died in bed, and that nothing good ever came of a Mallen. Starting in 1851, this compulsively...
(more)