Aurore Delacroix

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

Aurore Delacroix was born in 1910 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived forty-eight years as a typist in the shipping offices of Gravier Street and, from 1941, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes. The family book knows her as The Amber Drover. It classes her as a Broker, a hunter who deals in information, favours and the weaknesses of other people's schedules, who buys a fact on Monday and sells it on Thursday, and whose craft was Crowd Charm, the art of holding, steering and quietly emptying a crowd by the force of one calm voice. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She raised one son, the slayer Marius Delacroix, born in 1936 and dead in 2020, whose father the family papers do not name, and she died in 1958 of exposure on a winter watch, aged forty-eight. She was a small, neat, brown-haired woman with a very good ear, and the Delacroix who knew her say that she could take the temper of a room from the sound of its door. She was born in a back bedroom of a Garden District house on Jackson Avenue, a long way from where most Delacroix were born. Her mother, whom the papers do not name, kept house there for a family of cotton brokers, and the child came into the world among the pantry shelves and the good silver, delivered by the family's own doctor, who sent the bill to his hostess and was thanked. She grew up between two worlds, the white-columned one upstairs and the warm, noisy one below, and was at home in both. She knew what the ladies said at table and what the cook said to the ladies' backs. She had a trick, which she never lost, of standing perfectly still in a doorway until she was forgotten, and then hearing everything. At seven she told her mother which of the maids was stealing the tea. At eleven she was sent on a message to the Quarter and came back with the answer, a pecan praline and the name of a cousin she had never met, a milliner in Algiers named Clemence, who was said to be the best talker on the river. She went to a commercial school on Carondelet Street, learned shorthand and typewriting from a stern lady in a pince-nez, and at eighteen was typing for a firm of shipping agents on Gravier Street at nine dollars a week. She was a very good typist. She was exact, fast and silent, and a typist in a shipping office sees a great deal, because a bill of lading is a map of who is moving what and where. She never repeated what she copied. She remembered it. Within three years she knew which captains were short of crew, which warehouses were paying for the night watch and which of the river pilots had a second set of books, and she knew them with the cheerful, unhurried completeness of a woman who is only doing her work. Her employers valued her and underpaid her, which was the custom, and she bore it as a seed bears a winter. She was seventeen in the spring of 1927, when the great Mississippi flood sent the river over half the parishes and the city lived for weeks on the rumour of a cut levee. The Garden District stayed dry. She spent that week on the second floor of a church hall in the Irish Channel, in a borrowed apron, writing down names on a school slate as the refugees came in, family by family, and giving each a number, a blanket and a spoonful of sugar. By the end of the week, when the first of the lists had been copied out in three hands, she knew eleven hundred names and could say, without looking, which of them were cousins. The Delacroix who ran the relief that week, Xavier's mother Clemence among them, noticed her. They said afterwards that a girl who could keep eleven hundred names in her head and look cheerful would be wasted on a typewriter alone. The Depression years were thin, and they taught her the trade that would define her. She lost her post when the shipping agents cut their staff in half, and for two years she did odd typing for lawyers and for a ward politician, taking her pay in cash and in information, and discovering that she had a talent for a particular kind of exchange. A man who needed a letter typed would say a little more than he meant. A man who needed a favour would trade a fact. She began to bring these facts to the cousins of the House, who found them useful, and who in turn found her work that paid, and by the end of the thirties she was what the family book would later call a Broker, though she had not yet been called. She had a son in 1936, in the same rented room on Magazine Street where he would grow up. She gave him her name. She said that his father had been a gentleman who had gone, and nothing more, and the boy, who liked quiet, did not press. She was called in 1941. A neighbourhood night watch, set up on Magazine Street that winter by the wardens of the district, went out at dusk in pairs with a lantern and a whistle, and she had put her name down, on the theory that a woman who could not sleep might as well walk. On the first morning of the watch a body was found in the lane behind a church. The police took it away. On the second morning it was in the same place, in the same position, with the same look of mild surprise. On the third morning it was there again, and the watch, five men and Aurore, stood in the lane in the grey light and looked at it, and nobody said anything. It was Aurore who knelt down, and took a handkerchief, and turned back the collar, and said in a clear, reasonable voice that this was not the same corpse three times, but three nights' worth of the same thing, laid out where it wanted to be found. The men moved back. She sent one for a priest and another for a cousin on Esplanade, and she stayed, and she was still there at noon. Her training she took from the cousins, from Clemence's old circle in Algiers and from a Delacroix on Royal Street who taught her the trade of the crowd. A vampire, they said, hunts where people gather and are hard to count, at the second line, at the parade, in a church after the mass and a theatre after the show, and a hunter who can handle a crowd has the one advantage that the creature cannot match. She practised on Carnival Tuesday, in the press of Canal Street, with a whistle and a clear voice, turning a thousand people one way and then the other, quietly, as a drover turns a herd. She could find a stranger in a crowd by the way the crowd gave way around him, and she could make a hall of three hundred go out by a side door in ten minutes without one person realising that they had been moved. The cousins called her The Amber Drover, for the colour of her hair under a street lamp, and for the way she drove a crowd. Her gear was a pistol and silver rounds in a handbag with a good clasp. The war years brought soldiers to the city, and the work with them, and she spent them in the dance halls on Rampart Street and the Quarter bars, in a good coat, with a notebook in her bag, doing the Broker's quiet business of knowing where a stranger had been and who had seen him go. After the war she went back to typing and to the hunt. In the Korean War she worked with the cousins on the river front, and watched her son, who was fourteen and eager, with a mother's measure of alarm. She did not want him called. She taught him instead to drive, and in time he took a job on the buses, and was called in the end, in 1965, by the same sequence of mornings that had called her, though she did not live to see it. She died in January 1958. A hard frost lay on the city, and she had taken a night watch on a warehouse by the river where a thing had been seen twice, and had sent the younger watcher home with her own coat. She sat on a crate under the loading shed, in a cardigan, with her pistol on her knee, and did not move. She was found at dawn by the day foreman, quite cold, with her notebook open at a page of figures, and the figures, when Marius checked them that night, were right. She had not lived to see him marry Clara Allen Faulkner in 1961. But she had lived to see him grown, and it was said that she had never been prouder than on the evening, a few months before, when he came home from his first bus route and told her, in a voice of great seriousness, that he had counted every passenger. Aurore Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Amber Drover, the typist who could turn a crowd like a herd and who gave away her coat on the coldest night of the year. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet brokers of the old houses, the hunters who learned that a voice, a notebook and a good memory can move more of the dark than a rifle ever will.