Hesketh was a healer in the first century, who encountered and took pity on the injured and deformed vampire Teskhamen. She is described as having been a "hag" and a "prisoner of hideousness," with hunched shoulders, warts, and deformed limbs. She and Teskhamen fall in love turning his recovery, and he protects her from her enemies and reads the minds of those coming to ask her for favors. After Teskhamen gives her the Dark Gift, they live together for six hundred years before quarreling and parting ways. Hesketh is burned alive by a mortal mob, and Teskhamen buries her remains in an abandoned monestary.
Eventually while Teskahmen sits mourning at her grave, Hesketh's ghost encounters Gremt Stryker Knollys, and learns how to form a physical body. She returns to Teskhamen in her new form, tall with flaxen hair and gray eyes, without many of the physical deformities she had in life. Together, Hesketh, Teskhamen, and Gremt form the Order of the Talamasca, and serve as its mysterious Elders for centuries, before giving control of it to its mortal members in the early 21st century.