Alice Prejean

Spouse of Andrew Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Alice Prejean was born in 1871 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived forty-three years as a milliner, first in her father's front parlour and later in a shop on Royal Street in the French Quarter. She married the cattle drover Andrew Faulkner in 1893, raised two sons with him, Andrew Prejean Faulkner and Albert Prejean Faulkner, and died in 1914 of heart failure, aged forty-three, in the autumn when the war in Europe began. She was not a hunter and was not born into any of the great houses, although she belonged to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger by marriage and served it from the day she learned of it. The family remembers her as the milliner who made the best hat in the Quarter and kept the most honest set of books, and as the woman who, without ever firing a shot, looked after the money of the Ledger's New Orleans chapter for twenty years and never lost a dollar of it. She was born in a tall white house with a double gallery on Prytania Street, in the part of the city that the Americans had built after the Louisiana Purchase, in the days when the French of the old Quarter and the newcomers of the uptown did not dine together. Her father, a cotton factor on Carondelet Street, was of Acadian descent and had made a fortune in the seventies. Her mother, who ran the house on a rod of iron and a great many servants, had certain views about daughters, and they did not extend to hats. Alice, the second of four, was a small, dark, exact child with a precise hand and a grave expression, and she was the only one of the family who, at six, could sit through a church service without fidgeting. She looked at the hats. She came home, she said later, with the whole congregation in her head, and laid out the crowns and brims on the nursery floor in tissue paper. Her father indulged her, in a bemused fashion, at first, and then with some respect. At twelve she was allowed a dress form and a box of scraps. At fifteen she was apprenticed, on the firm recommendation of a family friend, to a milliner on Canal Street, who trimmed the hats of half the Garden District and who said that the girl had an eye for line that could not be taught. She learned steaming, stitching and wiring, the lore of feathers and the working of straw. She learned to keep accounts. The milliner, an exacting Swiss widow, taught her to record every yard of ribbon and every pin, on the ground that a shop that could not tell what it had sold could not tell what it had lost, and Alice kept her own books from that day to the last, in a small clean hand that nobody ever found an error in. By twenty she had a shop of her own, in the front parlour of her father's house, where she sold bonnets, toques and wide-brimmed garden hats to the ladies of the neighbourhood. It was a tidy, prosperous business, and she might have gone on in it for forty years if a heifer had not bolted on Magazine Street. The beast, which belonged to a drover of the Attakapas prairie, took fright at a streetcar, broke its rope and ran into the front garden of the house, where it ate a large part of a bed of roses. Alice came out with a parasol, in her grey silk, and was confronted by a large, brown, apologetic young man of twenty-three who took his hat off and said he was very sorry. She told him that the bed had taken three years. He said that he was sorry for the three years. She said that the hat was a very bad one and that if he came in on Thursday she would put a new band on it. He came in on Thursday. He came in on the following Thursday also, and on the third he brought the heifer. They were married in the spring of 1893, at St Louis Cathedral, with her father giving her away with some puzzlement, and a large and colourful group of her husband's relations from the Quarter on the other side of the aisle. Andrew's sister Clara, who was a dry and shrewd woman of twenty-five, told the bride in the vestry that the family was a peculiar one, and that she would in due course be told what sort of peculiar. It was in the first summer. Andrew, who could not keep a secret from a person he loved, told her one evening in the back room of her new shop on Royal Street, between a block of straw hats and a tray of pins. He said that his father had been a hunter of vampires, that his sister Sarah was a hunter of them too, and that the Faulkners had been at war with them for four hundred years. She listened to the end. She then asked him what the Ledger did for money. It was a fair question, and the answer was that nobody knew. The New Orleans chapter of the Red Ledger had existed for seventy years on the contributions of its members, which were kept in a cigar-box, in a bank-vault, in an oil-can and in the mattress of an old man in the Treme, and were accounted for by nobody in particular. Hunters ran short. They bought silver, lamp oil, train tickets and medicines out of their own pockets and were sometimes, at the end of a long winter, unable to pay their rent. She took a month to look into it. She found, in the pockets of the Ledger, about nine hundred dollars in seven places, and a debt to an apothecary of three hundred. She put the lot in a ledger of her own, and within a year she had the whole arrangement on a footing, a proper account of receipts and payments, with a quarterly statement delivered to a cousin in the Treme. She knew how to raise money, because she had grown up among the people who had it. A woman of the Garden District who had been told by her milliner, in a low voice, that a family of hunters in the Quarter was short of a little money, and that nobody had to know who had given it, would frequently say that she was sure she could help. The Ledger's funds increased by a third in her first three years. She kept the accounts of the chapter in her shop books, in the back of the ordinary account, in a column headed Sundries, and the auditors of the city, who once looked in to ask about a tax, found nothing out of the way. She used to say that a good set of books was the best disguise in the world, because nobody ever looks past a column of figures that adds up. Her sons were born in the first decade of the marriage. Andrew Prejean Faulkner was born in 1894 and lived until 1953. Albert Prejean Faulkner was born in 1898 and lived until 1976. Neither was a hunter, and she was privately relieved. She brought them up above the shop in the rooms on Royal Street, in the smell of steam and glue, and taught them both to add a column in their heads before they could write a letter. Andrew went into the cotton exchange, where he was the youngest man to be given a pit seat, and Albert into a bank, where he was a good deal more careful than the rest, though both later left their desks to become cattle drovers like their father. Both said that they had learned their trade from the milliner, and so it was. The shop flourished. The Storyville years, which began in 1897, brought her a new custom, the ladies of Basin Street, who had their own notions of a hat and paid in gold. She served them as she served the Garden District, with a level eye and a tape measure, and was heard to say that she had never met a customer who was not entitled to a good brim. The madams trusted her, the girls loved her, and a surprising number of the things that were said in her fitting-room found their way, by a long route, to a cousin in the Treme. She did not think that this was spying. She thought it was listening, and said that it was the chief occupation of a milliner. She died in the autumn of 1914, of heart failure, at forty-three, in the room over the shop, on a wet Tuesday in October, when the newspapers were full of the war that had begun in August and the dock at the foot of Canal Street was loaded with cotton for ships that would not sail. Her husband, who had driven in from Opelousas that afternoon, sat beside her. She was buried at the family tomb. The next Monday, her elder son, who was twenty, found in the drawer of the shop counter a neat, bound book, the account of the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter, balanced to the last penny on the day of her death, with a note in her small hand that read, Carried forward. Alice Prejean is remembered in the Faulkner family as the milliner of Royal Street, the wife who kept the chapter's books and balanced them. In the Slayerverse she stands for the bookkeepers of the Red Ledger, the people who never carried a weapon but who made sure that those who did were paid, fed and clothed, and who kept an honest account of the whole long war.