Clemence Delacroix

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

Clemence Delacroix was born in 1880 in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-four years as a milliner and a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix. The family book knows her as The Sure Tally, a name that recalls a count that always comes out right, and it classes her as a Charmer, a hunter who wins the confidence of the people around her and lets that confidence do the work of a weapon. Her craft was Candle Warding, the laying of candles and lamps in patterns that hold a threshold, and her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was called in 1914, in the fields after a hunt, when the hounds came back without the huntsman. She raised one son, the slayer Xavier Delacroix, born in 1911 and dead in 1994, whose father the family papers do not name, and she died in 1934 of exposure on a winter watch, aged fifty-four. She was a small woman who could sell a hat to a widow and a lie to a vampire, and she was honest with nearly everyone else. Algiers in 1880 was a low, green, noisy town on the west bank, with a dry dock, a railroad yard, a coal levee and a great many small painted cottages on streets that flooded every spring. It was joined to the city by a ferry that ran every quarter of an hour, and its people looked across the water with the mild contempt of the near neighbour. Clemence was the daughter of a cadet branch of the Norman-French Delacroix, who had come down from the Vieux Carre to work the river trades, and the family papers, in the Delacroix manner, do not name her parents. They say only that her mother was a great talker and her father a great listener, and that the child took after both. She was a dark, round-cheeked, sharp-eyed girl with a gap between her front teeth, and she was charming before she was old enough to know what the word meant. A stranger at the gate would come in for a glass of water and leave, twenty minutes later, with a parcel of pralines and the firm belief that he had been the one who asked for it. She learned hats from a Frenchwoman on the Algiers side who made bonnets for the wives of the railroad officers, and then, at sixteen, from a larger house in the Quarter, where she worked from seven to seven with a mouthful of pins. It was a good trade for a girl who liked to look at faces. A milliner has to read a customer the way a doctor reads a patient, and Clemence, who could tell from the set of a woman's shoulders whether she wanted to be made taller or to be left alone, became in a few years the person to whom the difficult customers were sent. She opened her own shop in 1903, a narrow room on a street behind the ferry landing, with two girls, a window and a painted sign, and called it simply Clemence, Milliner. She sold to the dockmasters' wives and, after the rise of the district, to the women who wanted something that could be seen across a dance floor. She kept honest accounts. She chalked each order on a slate behind the counter, in a clear upright hand, and it was said in Algiers that a Clemence reckoning never needed to be checked, which was how she earned the name that the family book later gave her. Her son was born in 1911. She brought him up in the room behind the shop, with the help of her mother, and registered him under her own name, which was the family's custom when the father's part in a child's life was a matter of discretion. He was a tall, serious, long-legged baby who slept in a hatbox and later, it was said, in a drawer of ribbons. She never told him more about his father than that he had been a gentleman, and Xavier, who was a gentleman himself, never asked. The boy was the centre of her days. She sewed him a sailor suit at four and a cadet's coat at ten, and she sent him across the river to school on the ferry, in a clean collar, with a packet of bread and cheese and the instruction to keep his eyes open. The calling came late, in 1914, in the autumn, in the fields behind Gentilly. She had gone out with a party of her customers' husbands to watch a hunt, a proper one, with horses, a master and a pack of twenty couple, and she had been put on a gig at the edge of a stubble field with a thermos of coffee and a view of the ride. The hounds went away at noon. They came back at dusk, all twenty couple, without the huntsman, silent, pressed together in a knot at the gate, with their hackles up and their tails down, and not one of them would go back into the field. The master said something short and sat his horse very still. Clemence, who had never been afraid of a dog in her life, climbed down from the gig and walked out across the stubble to look, and found the huntsman's horse, riderless, standing in the furrow with its head turned away. She found the man a hundred yards further on. He was sitting against a fence post, quite upright, with his hat neat on his knee and his collar buttoned, and the look on his face was of a man who has been very politely asked a question. She knew what had done it, although she had never heard the word. She stood there until the hounds stopped shaking. Her training came from her cousin, an old Delacroix who kept a tobacconist's in the Quarter and was the family's chief hunter in the parishes south of the city. He looked at her, and said that he had been wondering when she would come. He taught her the rules: to work at night, to work in the open and to be home by morning. He taught her to shoot. But it was the candle that became her craft. A candle, he told her, was the oldest ward in the world, and the simplest, for a vampire cannot cross the light of a flame laid in the right pattern on a threshold, and the pattern matters more than the flame. He taught her the patterns of the old Norman houses, the ring, the double ring, the stair and the three-lamp line, and she added two of her own, which she learned from the tallow chandlers of Algiers and which the family book calls the Milliner's Fan and the Ferry Light. She laid them by the dozen, in cellars and vestibules, in cottages on the levee and on the galleries of the big houses on St Charles, with a box of matches in her apron and a shop customer's smile on her face. She was a Charmer, and it was the charm that made her formidable. A vampire, she said, is a gentleman, or thinks that he is, and will answer a gentlewoman who is kind to him. She stood in doorways at midnight in a good hat and talked to things that should not have been there until the candles had caught, and she said, afterward, that she had never met one that could resist being told it looked tired. She was never hurt in the first twenty years of hunting. In the Great War, when the city filled with soldiers and every boarding house on Decatur and Rampart was full of young men who did not know the town, she laid wards on the lodging houses from dusk to dawn, and lost, by her own count, not one sleeper. In the floods of 1927, when the great Mississippi flood sent the river over half the parishes and the city was spared by the blowing up of a levee downriver, she rowed a skiff around Algiers with a lantern and a pistol, and brought, in three nights, eleven families to high ground. The Depression years were hard on a hat shop, as hard as they were on everything. She kept the shop by making her prices what people could pay and her hats what people could wear, and by the third winter she was taking in mending. Xavier, then grown, had taken up the work himself, and in 1932, at twenty-one, he married Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, of the Red Ledger, a match she had quietly and successfully arranged. She was delighted. She gave the young couple the room behind the shop, and moved into a smaller one on the other side of the yard, and it was said that she never again slept through a night. She died in January 1934, at fifty-four, on the bank of the Bayou Barataria, on a watch she had asked to take. It was a hard frost, the worst in ten years. She had set a line of candles across a path that a hunt had shown to be in use, and she sat down beside them in her good coat, in the dark, with a flask and her pistol, to see that none went out. Nothing came. She was found at dawn, sitting upright, quite cold, with the last candle still lit at her feet. The cause, the doctor wrote, was exposure. Xavier said that it was the line that had held. Clemence Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Sure Tally, the milliner who laid the lamps, the woman who could charm a night and count it true. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who used kindness as a tool and candlelight as a wall, and who proved that a gap-toothed smile and a good hat, carefully deployed, are as useful in the long war as a rifle.