Francoise Delacroix

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

A librarian has keys, and a librarian who has also been taught to count the candles in a room can do a great deal with them. Francoise Delacroix was born in 1956 in New Orleans (Treme), Louisiana, and is living today in Treme, where she has worked for forty years as a librarian and, from 1983, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix. The family book knows her as The Rough Kestrel, and it classes her as a Thief, a hunter who works by getting in and out of closed places, taking what a creature has hidden, and leaving the lock as she found it. Her craft is Candle Warding, the laying of lit candles across a threshold, a window and a stair so that a creature of the night is held outside a place that it wishes to enter, or inside one that it wishes to leave. Her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She belongs to the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French slayers of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes, and she raised one son, Gaspard Delacroix, born in 1982, who was not called, and who in 2000 married Linda Faulkner of the Red Ledger. The family remembers her as the librarian who read what the creature had written, and then sat up all night with a candle. She was born in Treme, the old Creole quarter behind the French Quarter, in a double cottage on a street of galleries, iron lacework and brass bands, in the late autumn of 1956, the year that the first of the great postwar highway plans began to be drawn on the maps of the city, to the dismay of everybody who lived on it. The neighbourhood was musical to the point of exhaustion. There was a funeral with a band on the corner every second Sunday, a second line behind it, and a club on every block, and the child learned to sleep through a trombone as other children learn to sleep through rain. Her people were Delacroix of the old stock, and the house in which she was raised was a house of rules, a house in which a candle was lit for the dead on the first of November and a second one, for reasons that were not explained, in the back window on any night when the moon was dark. She was a small, dark, upright girl with a long neck and a way of looking at a thing that made people stop talking. At six she was given the family's name for her, which was the Kestrel, because she would stand quite still in a doorway and watch. She learned to read before she learned to walk steadily, and at seven she was found on the floor of the front room with the city directory open before her, working her way down the Ds. Her people were not great readers. They were not great talkers either, in the matter of the work, and the child grew up in a house in which the most interesting subject was never mentioned and where she was therefore driven, from the earliest age, to read around it. She took a library card at six, and by ten she was at the old branch on the edge of the quarter every afternoon, reading her way along the shelves with the application of a person looking for an exit. The librarian, a retired schoolteacher of seventy, set her to shelving the books at the age of eleven. It was the first job that she ever had, and she found in it, to her surprise, the thing that her family had never been able to name, which was a place in which everything was where it was supposed to be and in which a stranger could be told where to go. She was told about the Delacroix work at seventeen, in the autumn of 1973, by an aunt who ran a bakery in the Vieux Carre, in the back of the shop, over a tray of pralines. The aunt said it in the flat, tidy voice in which the House of Delacroix says everything, and Francoise, who had suspected, said that she had been wondering when somebody would. She went to the university in the city in 1974 and took a degree in history in 1978 and a diploma in library science in 1980. She was a graduate librarian, in the Vietnam years' long tail, at a branch library on the edge of the quarter, a long brown building with a clock and a fan, to which a good many old men came to read the papers, and from the first week she did what her trade permits, which was to watch the room. She learned in a year which of the readers were cranks and which were not. She learned that a library has a set of keys of a kind that nothing else in the city has, to the stacks, the vaults, the periodicals room, the basement and the old rare-book cage, and that nobody has ever asked a librarian why she needs to go in. Security people call it access. The Ledger, in its older and plainer vocabulary, called it a Thief's gift. The calling came in the autumn of 1983, in an inn yard, when a guest asked for lodging and would not cross the threshold. She was twenty-seven. She was working on the evenings, for extra money, at a small guest house in the Quarter, one of the old courtyard places with a carriage arch, a fountain and a lamp over the door, which belonged to a friend of her mother's and which she minded on the nights that the friend went to her sister. At about half past nine a man had come to the arch in an expensive coat, with no luggage. He asked, in a courteous voice and in very good French, for a room. She said that he was welcome. She stood in the doorway with the register and the candle that was kept lit on the sill, and she said it twice, and he did not come in. He stood in the yard, under the lamp, with his hands at his sides, smiling, and he looked at the candle. She noticed that his shadow fell the wrong way. She noticed that the fountain had not touched him. She told him, very politely, that the house was full. He bowed and went out under the arch, and she shut the gate, and then she sat on the step with the candle in her lap and read every word that she could remember of the Delacroix book, which she had been taught and had never used. It was the most careful thing that she had ever done. In the morning she told her aunt that she was ready. She did not take it up as a fighter. She took it up as a thief, and she learned the craft that was suited to her, from the aunt and from a retired Delacroix cousin on the bayou, over three winters. Candle Warding, as she practised it, was a woman's craft, tidy and slow. A candle lit across a threshold is not a wall, but it is a form of words in fire, and it sets a boundary that a creature of the old sort will not cross uninvited. It could be laid in a line across a doorsill, or in a ring in a courtyard, or in a set of three at the window of a sleeping child. The art lay in knowing how many, how far apart, what to burn and how to see that they did not go out. She could lay a ward in four minutes. She could hold a house for a night with seven candles and a cup of coffee. She chose the name herself, in the spring of 1985, after the little hawk that hangs over a field, and the aunt added the word that made it hers. The family book says that she was a rough sort of kestrel, who did not always go in by the front. She took her first creature in the winter of 1986, in a rented room off Esplanade, having got in, without a sound, through a window that the creature had believed shut. She had been told by a reader of the library that a man who never came out in the day had taken a room, and it was she, with the key of the landlady, a candle and a knife, who went through the door. She says that it was a library skill. She had looked up the name, found it in a register that was a hundred years old, and discovered that the man had taken it from a corpse. She brought the page to the Ledger. In thirty years she took eleven, and she took each of them by first finding where it had been written down. Her son was born in the spring of 1982, before she was called, and she raised him in the cottage in Treme with the help of her aunt and the neighbours, and brought him up to read. His father is not in the family papers, and she has never offered his name. Gaspard Delacroix was a stubborn, funny, bookish child who was found at nine reading the encyclopaedia in the bath. He was not called, and she was not sorry. She said that a family needs someone who is allowed to go to bed at ten. He married Linda Faulkner in the year 2000, at eighteen, as the Delacroix always had done, a good deal too young, and the match was a good one. Linda was the elder daughter of the late slayer Felix Delacroix, a cousin in the loose sense in which the House counts such things, and of the slayer Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, and Francoise, who had known the girl since she was a baby in a pram, said that she had been waiting to get her into the family. She was at work in the library on the morning of September 2001, in the reading room, where the staff stood round a small television, and she went on stamping books. She was in the city in the last week of August 2005, when the hurricane came, and she left on the Saturday for Atlanta with Gaspard, Linda and a box of the family's papers, and she came back in the November to a cottage in Treme with a waterline four feet up the wall, a branch library with its collection on the pavement and a basement full of silt. She lit a candle in the front window. She spent a year putting the books to rights, and the Ledger's Louisiana chapter says that it was the first time in the history of the city that a Thief had personally dried a hundred and eleven rare maps. She is living today in Treme, in the rebuilt cottage, with a stack of books at her bedside and a candle on every sill, and she walks, in the evenings, to the corner where the band used to stand. Francoise Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Rough Kestrel, the librarian of Treme who got in by the side window and held a house with seven candles. In the Slayerverse she stands for the thieves of the Ledger, the hunters who went by keys, by paper and by stealth, and who proved that a shut door is no more than an invitation to a person who has read the register and brought her own light.