Adele Delacroix

Slayer of House of Delacroix, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

Adele Delacroix was born in 1772 in the Lafourche bayou country of Louisiana, in the settlement that would later be called Thibodaux, and she lived sixty-eight years as a midwife and a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix. The family Ledger calls her The Still Mantle, a name taken from the dark cloak she wore on her rounds and from her habit of standing quite motionless for long stretches while she watched. She was a Detective in the family's terms, a slayer who solved a hunt the way a physician solves an illness, by attending closely to the symptoms. She died in 1840 in an accident at the age of sixty-eight, leaving a son, Hippolyte Delacroix, and a reputation that her Norman-French house cherished for generations. The House of Delacroix was Norman-French in origin. Its slayers had hunted in the orchards and port towns of Normandy and, after the Acadian and Louisiana migrations, in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans and the bayou parishes that stretched west and south of the city. The family's characteristic discipline was observation, and its hunters were known for their long, patient inquiries, their cool nerves and their dislike of anything that looked like a brawl. When the Faulkner and Proctor lines came to Louisiana in the nineteenth century, they found that the Delacroix had been there for a hundred years and had maps of the city that their own hunters could not match. Adele's childhood was spent under a Spanish flag. The colony of Louisiana had passed from France to Spain in 1763, and the governors who ruled from the Cabildo in New Orleans were Spanish soldiers presiding over a French-speaking population, with a growing number of Acadian exiles, free people of colour, Germans from the German Coast and enslaved Africans. On the bayou, life ran on indigo, then sugar, cypress logging and the daily rhythm of the water. The houses stood on raised brick piers to keep them dry, the roofs were steep against the rain, and the gallery was the principal room of the house. Adele grew up speaking French at home, Spanish in the notary's office and a little English with the flatboatmen who came down the Mississippi. The notary who wrote her baptismal record spelled her name in the Spanish manner, and she corrected it for the rest of her life. She trained as a midwife in her teens, and for that trade she had a great gift. The bayou parishes had few physicians, and births were attended by women who passed on their skill from mother to daughter or from mistress to apprentice. Adele attended her first delivery at sixteen, during a hurricane, and from that night she was in constant demand. She rode, poled a pirogue and walked across half the parish to reach a woman in labour, carrying a bag of clean linen, a knife, a bottle of brandy and a string of blessed beads. A midwife went into every house in the country sooner or later, saw the sleeping arrangements and the unwashed dishes, and was told things that nobody said to a priest. It was the best cover a detective could wish for. The calling came in 1805, when she was thirty-three, and it came through a church. The Louisiana Purchase had passed the colony from France to the United States two years before, in a ceremony in the Place d'Armes in which the flags had changed three times in a month, and the new American governor was struggling to make sense of a population that spoke no English. In a parish church on the bayou, the bell-ringer failed to come down from the tower after the evening Angelus. Adele, who had been at the church for a christening, climbed the stairs with the sexton and found the ringer lying beside the bell, pale, drained and still breathing. She also found a detail that nobody else had noticed, a set of clean footprints on a dusty floor that ended at a wall. The trail led her to a hunt that took six weeks, in the course of which she learned that she could think as a hunter as well as act like one. Her craft, which the Delacroix called Second Line Cover, was a method of following a suspect at the tail of a crowd. In a country of funerals, feast days and processions, she had learned that nobody looked at the people who walked behind a procession, because attention was on the coffin, the band or the priest. A hunter who walked in that trailing place, in a dark mantle, with her eyes down, could follow a person for a mile through a town without ever being noticed. She used it in the Vieux Carre, along the levee and through the carnival crowds. Her gear was silver-cast shot and, in her later years, an early revolving pistol of the new kind, a rare and temperamental piece that she kept oiled and used only at close range. She trusted it rather less than the plain knife she wore under her mantle. Her son, Hippolyte Delacroix, was born in 1807. The family papers do not name his father, and Adele never discussed him, and the House of Delacroix, which was used to the discretion of its women, left the matter alone. Hippolyte was not a slayer. He grew up to be a quiet, educated man who worked as a clerk, then as a notary, and in 1828 he married Eliza Faulkner, which tied the House of Delacroix into the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger and brought the Norman-French hunting tradition into the family that would later produce Grace Faulkner. Adele lived through the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans, when Andrew Jackson's riflemen, Choctaw scouts, free men of colour and Jean Lafitte's gunners beat back a British army on the plain of Chalmette in January 1815. She helped the wounded in the days after, and she hunted in the confusion, taking three vampires who had come in with the smoke. The Ledger counts it among her best seasons. She worked into her sixties, training a younger generation of Delacroix hunters, and in 1840, at the age of sixty-eight, she died in an accident, a fall from a rotted gallery while she was examining a house. Her funeral in New Orleans was one of the largest the Delacroix had held. Adele Delacroix is remembered as the midwife of the bayou and the first great detective of her house. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet method of the Delacroix, in which a hunt was solved by watching, waiting and following at the tail of a crowd.