Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Delacroix), known as The Quiet Rook. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1962 at Thibodaux, Louisiana, and has lived, so far, as a bookkeeper and, since 1995, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix, carrying the blood of the Red Ledger through her mother. She is living today in Thibodaux. The family book knows her as The Quiet Rook and classes her as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who goes out, finds the thing and deals with it without a disguise or a crew. Her craft is Dusk Patrol, the discipline of walking one fixed route at the turn of the light, every evening, until the route itself tells you what has changed, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She is the only child of the bus driver and slayer Marius Delacroix, The Sable Anvil, and of the hospital cook and slayer Clara Allen Faulkner, The Bitter Harrow, who died in the year that she was born. In 1986 she married the diner cook Leonard Washington, and they raised two daughters, Clara Washington Faulkner, born in 1987, and Monica Faulkner, born in 1988, neither of whom was called. Leonard died in 2024, and she trained under her father until he died in 2020. She was born in Thibodaux because her mother went home to be confined. The Allen cousins kept a feed store on Bayou Lafourche, with rooms above it, and Clara, who had been born in the same back room twenty-nine years before, took the ferry and the bus to lie in there, with the rain on the tin roof and a cousin to boil the water. Marius, who could not leave his run, came down on the Sunday with a bag of oranges and a Delacroix ledger of every bus timetable between the two places, and stood in the doorway for some time looking at the child. She was named for nobody in particular, which in that family was unusual, and it was said that her mother had wanted a name that had not been used up. Clara went back to her post in the summer and took the baby to her sister Marguerite for the daytime. In the same year, after a long night on the marsh, she died. Cynthia was a baby, and she was told the date, the place and the cause as one is told a bus route, in full and without ornament, when she was old enough to ask. She was brought up by a bus driver with the help of a street. Marius took a small house in Algiers and kept his run on St Claude and Tulane. Her aunt Marguerite Faulkner and Marguerite's husband, the lineman Roy Robichaux, had her for Sunday dinners, and she grew up with their children as cousins, which they were. Her aunt Thelma came down on the train from Midland, in the first weeks, to do the accounts, and went on doing them by post for a good many years. From Thelma she learned the first thing that she knew about a ledger, which was that the totals are the last thing to look at and the first thing to lie. From her father she learned how to ride. She sat behind the driver's seat with a library book, from the age of six, on the St Charles line, and he would say, without turning round, how many were aboard. She learned to count them herself. She learned that a regular who has stopped sitting on the left is a regular who has something on his mind, and that a stranger who does not look at the other passengers is looking at them more than anyone. She went into the books because she liked them. A girl who has been taught to keep accounts by an aunt in Texas and to count heads by a father in Louisiana is a girl who finds that columns of figures are a form of peace, and she took a post at eighteen with a ship chandler on Tchoupitoulas Street, and then with a firm that sold bakery supplies to the whole of the parish. She kept the ledgers of a flour merchant for twenty years. It was a quiet trade, which suited a quiet woman, and it had the great advantage that nobody asked a bookkeeper where she had been at night. In 1986 she married Leonard Washington, a diner cook of twenty-seven, who made the best red beans on Claiborne Avenue and who was told on the second Sunday of his courtship what the family did. He heard it out, asked whether he should leave the porch light on, and was told that it would be appreciated. He was not a hunter and made no pretence of being one. He cooked, in the hours when hunters need feeding, and the Ledger found that a diner kitchen with a back door was worth a great deal. Clara and Monica were born in 1987 and 1988, and they grew up, like their mother, in a house of two languages, one for the street and one for the Ledger. Neither was called. Clara became a nurse in Seattle after some years of teaching and Monica a line cook in Houston after some years of survey work, and both knew, and both kept the porch light when asked, and both, her mother observed, had a way of looking at a street that they had not got from their father. Cynthia did not press them. She had been the child of a hunter who was not told to hunt, and she held that a calling that has to be argued for is no calling. She was called in 1995, when she was thirty-three, and she was called by a bell. She was in a church in Algiers on an errand for a cousin, with a payroll envelope for the sexton, on a grey evening in the autumn, when the bell-ringer went up the tower stair to ring the evening bell and did not come down. The bell stopped in the middle of a peal. She knew, as a bookkeeper knows an entry that does not balance, that the interval was wrong. She stood in the nave with the envelope in her hand and counted. At the end of five minutes she took the stair, found the ropes swinging and the louvres open and an old man's cap on the boards, and saw on the beam above the bell a long pale smear that no man could have reached. The cousins remarked later that the Ledger had been called by a bell before, in the Treme in 1956, and that it was apparently a thing that bells did. She sat in the tower for two nights, and on the second the ringer came back down the stair on his own legs, alive, and unable to say where he had been. She did not fire a shot. She had counted the hours, and the thing was taken on the street by two cousins who had been waiting where she said. When it was over she went to her father's door, and he put the coffee on and said that he had been wondering when. Marius trained her himself, in the evenings, on foot. He made her walk. Dusk Patrol, as he taught it, was a route and an hour. She chose a walk of about two miles, the same each night, from the levee to the church and back by the rail yard, and she walked it at the turn of the light, in the same shoes, at the same pace, for a year before he allowed her a gun. She learned the walk as she had learned a column of figures, until a bin that had been moved or a lamp that had gone out or a dog that did not bark stood out like a wrong digit. After the year, she found that she could feel the walk change. A street would be, in some small way, off. She would then look, and what she found was, a good many times, what she had been walking to find. Marius called it the only sensible method he had ever heard of for catching a thing that had been in the neighbourhood longer than the neighbours. She carried a service pistol, which a retired policeman in the family had procured, and a silver-edged knife, which her mother had left, and she used the second a good deal less than the first. She was a hunter of the neighbourhoods. Her routes ran through the Faubourg, along the Mississippi levee, past the jazz clubs of Frenchmen Street, where she liked to stand at the back and listen to the second set, and through the low, close streets of the floodplain where a thing could lie in a cellar and not be missed. On the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 she was at her desk, with the radio on, and she did what she did on any bad morning, which was to finish the ledger and go for her walk. In the summer of 2005 Leonard took the girls to Baton Rouge on the Sunday while she stayed at her father's house on higher ground, and afterwards, when the levees failed and the water stood in Algiers and Gentilly for three weeks, she did her patrol by boat and then on a borrowed bicycle. The flood brought up what the flood brings up. The Ledger was grateful, in the autumn of that year, for the one hunter in the parish who knew every street at dusk and knew what was missing from it. After the flood she and Leonard kept the house in the Irish Channel, and in the later years she spent more and more of her time at a small brick bungalow on a street of oaks at Thibodaux, where she had been born, while Leonard drove in to the Blue Plate on Magazine Street until the week he died. She went on keeping books, for a feed and seed firm, from a desk at home. Her father, who had retired from the buses in 1998 and still rode the St Charles line each morning, died in the summer of 2020, in the pandemic year, at his kitchen table with a notebook open, and she was beside him in the hospital at the end. The funeral was held in the open, with the mourners standing apart, and she counted them. Leonard died in 2024, and was buried from the church at Thibodaux with a plate of his own red beans at the wake. She walks still. The route in Thibodaux is shorter, along the bayou and back by the courthouse, and she does it at the turn of the light with a flask and her knife. The neighbours say that she is a very quiet woman, who is never late and who has never once been seen to hurry. Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Quiet Rook, the bookkeeper who walked the same road every dusk until the road told her something. In the Slayerverse she stands for the patient hunters of the old houses, the ones who gave the work a route, an hour and a clean column, and who learned from a bus driver and a cook that the dead are best found by the people who notice what has moved.