Beatrice Seneca

Spy slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Bitter Latch. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Beatrice Seneca was born in 1923 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and died there in 1965 of cancer, aged forty-two. She worked as a typist in the cotton offices of Carondelet Street, and for twenty-four of her forty-two years she was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, known to the family book as The Bitter Latch. She was a Spy, a hunter who works by observation, access and the quiet use of other people's rooms, and her craft was Beacon Reading, the art of telling from a lit window, a lamp or a signal light what a house, a street or a harbour is trying to say. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She was called in 1941, in a cellar, when the stores were found untouched and the household gone. She belonged to the Faulkner bloodline through her mother and to no great house, and in 1952 she married the cotton factor and slayer Milton Faulkner, with whom she had two children, Ethel Faulkner, born in 1954, and Leonard Faulkner, born in 1955 and dead in 1981, both of whom became slayers. The Faulkners remember her as the one who could read a city by its lights. She was born in the Garden District in the winter of 1923, in a tall, galleried house on a street of oaks and iron fences, in the quarter of the city that the Americans had built across Canal Street after the Louisiana Purchase and where the sugar and cotton fortunes had lived in the last century in houses like wedding cakes. Her people were not among the fortunes. Her father was a pharmacist on Magazine Street, her mother a Faulkner cousin of the Red Ledger who had married out of the tradition and had been politely forgiven for it, and the family occupied the upper half of a double house, with a rented lower floor, a magnolia and a cistern. The district was the sort of place in which every house had a secret and most of them had a cellar, and the child, who was a pale, narrow, watchful girl, soon knew every window on the block. She could say, at six, who was home, who was ill, and whose lamp had been left lit all night. Her mother had given her the habit. It was a family game, played at dusk on the gallery, called the lights, in which the child was asked to say what each window meant. A candle in the third-floor front was a sick child. A green shade pulled halfway was a husband away on the river. The old Frenchwoman across the road, a widow, left a lamp in the kitchen on a Friday and not on the other six days, and by the age of nine Beatrice had worked out, without help, that this was a signal to someone, and had asked her mother whom. Her mother, who had expected a child of nine to ask about the colour of the lamp, put down her sewing. She said that when Beatrice was a good deal older there were a few things about the Faulkners that she would explain. She grew up in the Depression, in a household that had a great many books and not much money, and she went to a Catholic school on the avenue, where the nuns, who prized neat work, taught her to type. She was fast. She finished her course at sixteen, a year early, at a hundred and ten words a minute with no errors, and took a position in the autumn of 1939 with a cotton broker on Carondelet Street. It was a long, brown room with high windows and twelve desks, where the typing of contracts, bills of sale, option notes and insurance policies went on from eight until six under a ceiling fan. She learned in it what a document meant. She learned to read a page upside down across the desk, to remember the figures that went through her machine and to keep her face smooth. A typist in a cotton office hears everything and is thought to hear nothing, and Beatrice, who had a good deal of practice at being overlooked, took to it at once. The calling came in the autumn of 1941, in a cellar. She was eighteen. The widow across the road, whom she had known since childhood, had not been seen for nine days, and the lamp in the kitchen had been burning in the daytime. Beatrice, who had been sent by her mother with a dish of rice, found the front door on the latch and went through the house, and in the cellar, among the ranked jars, the barrels of flour and the strings of onions, she saw that every store in the place was untouched. The preserves were in order. The ham hung from its hook. The household, a widow, a maid, a grandson and a lodger, had gone, and there was not a mark on the floor. She stood for some time in the light of the one small window, and then she did a thing that she could not afterwards explain, which was to go back upstairs and look at the lamp. It was set in the attic window, in a certain order, with the shade drawn up and let down, and it had been signalling to the street for a week. The pattern was long, short, short. She was fairly sure that someone had been asking for help, in the one language that the house still had, and that no one on the street had been able to read it. She was found by her mother on the back step, with the dish in her hands and the latch of the cellar door, an old iron one, which she had worked loose, in her apron pocket. She said that she wished to be told what it was. She was told, by a cousin of her mother's, a retired steamboat pilot's widow of the Red Ledger who lived in the Lower Garden District and who had been waiting some years for the child to come to the door. The cousin taught her the work, in the Faulkner manner, in the afternoon, over a pot of coffee, with a pair of opera glasses. She said that a Spy did not, as a rule, fight. A Spy was in the room first, and had a reason to be there, and went away with what she had come for. Beatrice, whom the cousin found a natural, was given her gear, a pistol that had belonged to a Confederate captain and a case of silver rounds, and the beginnings of a craft. She named it herself, in the second year, Beacon Reading, after the old harbour lights of Lake Pontchartrain. It was a discipline of windows, lamps and signal lights, a way of treating the nightly pattern of a city as a text. A creature in a house, she said, changes the lights. It does not like them, and it cannot leave them alone. It draws a shade where a family would not, or leaves a lamp lit on the wrong night. A woman who has learned the lights of a street can see, from the corner, that a house has gone wrong. The name was given later. It was the latch that did it. She kept the iron latch on a string round her neck, under her blouse, from that autumn, as a reminder of the house, and it was the cousin who observed, on seeing it, that a latch which had failed to keep anything in was a bitter thing to wear. The Ledger had called a good many hunters by worse. She was The Bitter Latch from the spring of 1942, and the name held, because it was a cheerful, practical, rather sharp-tongued young woman who wore it. She worked for twelve years in the dark of the Depression's long tail and the war years, by day on her machine and by night in the streets. New Orleans in the forties was a city of neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and the long grey floodplain, and its lights were extraordinary. She read the lit windows of the Garden District and of the Irish Channel and the Tremé, the blue bulbs over the doors of the Rampart Street clubs, the red lamps of the river, the green shaded bulb of a certain shotgun house in the Ninth Ward that burned all night. She kept a notebook. She took her first creature in the summer of 1943, in a boarding house in the Marigny, and her tenth by the end of the Korean War, and she did it, as a rule, without a shot, by being the first person to reach the house and the last to leave it. She met Milton Faulkner in 1951, at the Cotton Exchange, where he had come, at twenty-four, to be a factor's clerk and she had come to deliver a contract. He was a thin, grave, black-haired young man with the Faulkner jaw and a pistol in his desk. He said that he knew who she was. She said that she was aware of it, and that she had expected it to take him longer. They were married in 1952, in the spring, in a church in the Garden District, with her mother in the front pew and the whole Red Ledger chapter in the back. It was said that it was the first wedding in the city at which more than half of the guests were armed. They lived in a small house in Algiers, near the ferry landing. Ethel Faulkner was born in 1954, and Leonard Faulkner in 1955, and both of them, in the way of the house, were called. The illness came in 1964. She was forty-one, and she was told by a doctor at Touro, on a Tuesday, that there was nothing to be done. She went home and typed, for Milton, who was in the next room, a single page headed Instructions. She continued to read the lights from her bed. Hurricane Betsy came up the river in the second week of September 1965, and the power went out over the whole city, and for the first time in her life she had no lights to read. She asked for a candle in the front window. Milton, who had been out all night with the levee crews, brought one, and Ethel, who was eleven, held it. She said that it was a very fine lamp. She died in November, in her own bed, at home, with the window open and the lights of the street on the ceiling, and was heard to say, at the end, that all of the shades were right. Beatrice Seneca is remembered in the Faulkner family as the typist of Carondelet Street who could read a city by the lamps in its windows. In the Slayerverse she stands for the spies and watchers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who went in first and left last, and who proved that a street full of ordinary lights, read carefully, will tell the truth about the house that has gone dark.