Gaspard Delacroix

Spouse of Linda Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from the House of Delacroix.

The first thing that Gaspard Delacroix ever read, by his mother's account, was the label on a jar of cough syrup, and the first thing he ever diagnosed was a cousin's limp. He was born in 1982 in New Orleans (Treme), Louisiana, and is living today in the same neighbourhood, where he works as a nurse on a medical ward. He is of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French slayers of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes, and of the Faulkner bloodline by marriage, but he is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and he has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. He is the only son of the librarian and slayer Francoise Delacroix, The Rough Kestrel, whose father for the boy the family papers do not name, and in 2000 he married Linda Faulkner, a paramedic of the Red Ledger, with whom he had one son, Gaspard Faulkner, born in 2002. The Delacroix remember him as the one who stayed up with the sick, the member of the house who took the quiet shift on a ward while his mother and his cousins took theirs in the street. He was born in the spring of 1982 in the double cottage in Treme, on a street of galleries and iron lacework, with the sound of a trombone through the wall. His mother was twenty-five, a graduate librarian at a branch on the edge of the quarter, and she had not yet been called; she took up the Delacroix work the following year. His father is not in the family papers and Francoise has never offered a name, and the boy, who asked once at seven, was told that there were things a person had a right to know and things a person had a right to leave alone, and that he might come back to the question when he was twenty-one. He did, and was told the same, and said, with considerable dignity, that he supposed it had been a fair trial. After that he never raised it. He grew up with a mother, an aunt who kept a bakery in the Vieux Carre, a number of neighbours and a candle in every window, and was by general agreement a stubborn, funny, bookish child who would not go to bed until the chapter was finished. He was found at nine reading the encyclopaedia in the bath, which his mother said was a respectable place to be found. She had made a rule that he might read anything in the house, and he read everything. He read the library's books on anatomy, because they had the best pictures, and a cheap manual of first aid, and a medical dictionary the size of a paving stone that a retired doctor on the street gave him on his eleventh birthday. At twelve he was the neighbourhood's authority on burns. A girl at his school put her arm against an oven, and he was found beside her, holding it under the tap and reciting the first-aid manual in a firm voice while the teachers hunted for the nurse. He was told afterwards, by his mother, that if a person did that sort of thing at a house with candles in every window, he must expect to be popular at every cookout on the street. He was told what the family did on his fifteenth birthday, at the kitchen table, over a plate of pralines, by Francoise, in the flat tidy voice in which the House of Delacroix says everything. He heard it to the end and asked whether it was dangerous. She said that it was. He asked whether he was expected to join. She said that he was not, that nobody was ever expected to, and that a family needed somebody who was allowed to go to bed at ten. He took it, at the time, for a kindness, and has since come to think of it as one of the wisest things that anyone ever said to him. He was a member of the household who was entitled to say no, and the saying of it had no cost. He kept the candles lit. He learned, on the nights when his mother was out, to hold the front window with seven of them, laid in a row along the sill, and to feed them, and to sit up with a flask. He was a good warder and was never asked to be more. He met Linda Faulkner in the spring of 1998, on the steps of a church hall in Treme, where she had come with her mother to a funeral supper and was standing at the edge of the crowd with a paper plate. She was sixteen, a solid, level-eyed girl who, as he noticed, was looking after four small cousins and a very old man in a wheelchair at the same time. He said that he had never seen anyone so efficient. She said that it was only that nobody else had volunteered. He had been given the same speech about the family by his own mother, and said so, and she said that she had heard it too; and they spent the rest of the evening, among the sandwiches, comparing the wording. They were married in 2000, at eighteen, which was a good deal too young and which the Delacroix had always done. Francoise said that she had known the girl since she was a baby in a pram, and that she had been waiting years to get her into the family. He trained as a nurse in the first years of the marriage, at a university programme in the city, working nights at a nursing home to pay for it, and he qualified in 2004, at twenty-two, with a baby son and a wife who was already on the ambulances. Gaspard Faulkner had been born in the spring of 2002, a long, silent, wide-eyed child with his mother's calm, and the household ran on two rotas that met in the hall at about seven in the morning, one going out and one coming in, and a handing over of the baby. On the morning of September 2001, before the child was born, he was a student on a ward with a television at the end of the corridor, and the sister in charge, a Haitian woman of sixty, told the whole row of trainees to go on with the bed baths, since the patients had not stopped being ill. He has said that he has never forgotten it. In the last week of August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came, he drove out on the Saturday for Atlanta in his mother's car with Francoise, Linda, the three-year-old and a box of the family's papers in the boot. Linda lasted four days, and then went back with the ambulances. He nursed in Atlanta in a borrowed uniform, at a hospital that had taken in the evacuated, for ten weeks, and learned that the sick do not mind where they are as long as somebody comes. When he came home in the November, to a cottage with a waterline four feet up the wall and a mother who was lighting a candle in the front window, he scrubbed the plaster and dried the books with her for a year. A good many of the library's maps, he says, were saved by being hung on his clothes line. He took a post on a medical ward, where he has been for most of twenty years, and where he is known for a trick of sitting down on the edge of a patient's bed, in the middle of the night, to talk about nothing at all. In the pandemic years he nursed in a mask, a visor and a gown, on a ward that was turned over in a week to the new illness, and he slept in the car outside the cottage for the best part of two months, with a thermos and a picture of his son. He was thirty-seven, and said afterwards that it was the first time in his life that he had been frightened for his mother. She was sixty-three and living a quarter of a mile away. She left a pot of red beans on the step every second day. His wife, who was on the same front line in another uniform, was asleep in the shed. He did not tell either that he had never been so proud, and each of them, as he found, had said the same to a cousin. He lives now in the cottage in Treme, with Linda, a bicycle apiece and a shelf of books, and he walks his mother home from the library in the evenings when she will allow it. He is a tall, spare, grey-flecked man with a gentle manner and a voice that carries well in a ward. His son, who is of age, has not been called and has taken after his father in one respect, which is that he is found reading in the bath. Gaspard Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the nurse of Treme, the son of the Rough Kestrel who was told that he might go to bed at ten and who spent a good many nights awake beside other people's beds. In the Slayerverse he stands for the nurses and carers of the Ledger's houses, who were never called to the hunt and who never asked to be, and who showed that the work of keeping the living alive is every bit as much the family's business as the work of finding the dead.