Georgia Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Georgia Faulkner was born in 1840 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-eight years as a schoolteacher in the French Quarter, where she taught for forty-one of them. She was the elder daughter of the boatman Charles Eaton and of the seamstress and vampire slayer Mary Lowry Faulkner, The Hollow Rook, and the sister of the slayer Fanny Eaton. She married the carpenter Baptiste Delacroix in 1860, raised two children with him, Elias Faulkner Delacroix and Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, and died in 1908 of a stroke, aged sixty-eight. She was not a hunter, although her mother and her sister were, and she was the first of the Kentucky Faulkners to marry into the House of Delacroix, which she did by the simple method of walking into a courtyard and staying. But for four decades she kept a schoolroom in the Quarter in which the children of the Red Ledger's New Orleans cousins learned to read, to reckon and to tell the truth, and the family remembers her as the teacher who was never once surprised by what a child told her. She was born in a back bedroom above the physic garden of Zoe Delacroix, on Royal Street, because her father's flatboat was laid up in the city that winter and her mother, who had come down with him for the voyage, would not be left upriver. It was a cold, clear week in January, and the river was low. Charles Eaton, who was to have been in the Gulf within the month, had his cargo of Kentucky whiskey in barrels on the levee, and he sat on one of them for three days, in a state of suspended anxiety, while the herbalist and a midwife of the Quarter attended his wife above. The child was born at dawn. She was long, dark, silent and serious, and took a great interest in the ceiling. Zoe Delacroix, who had raised a child of her own and did not like to be thought sentimental, put her into her mother's arms and observed that she had a look of the garden about her. She said it as a judgement. It was not a compliment. A garden, she said, was a thing that waited. The family went home to Louisville in the spring, by steamboat, and Georgia grew up in the cottage on the bluff, in the shadow of the river and the shadow of a mother who was a great deal busier than she seemed. She was an orderly, thoughtful, rather watchful child. Her sister Fanny, who was born two years later at Lexington, in the landlady's back bedroom, was a small, loud, inquisitive girl who could not see a closed door without asking what was behind it, and the two were quite unlike. Georgia read the books. Fanny read the room. It was a division of labour that the household found convenient, and which Georgia, who was the quieter, did not resent. Her father taught her to swim, to tie a knot and to sing. He made her a small tight barrel with a lid, in which she kept her treasures, which were a number of well-chosen stones, a piece of blue glass and a list. She was told what her mother did at twelve, in the kitchen, with the door shut. The Hollow Rook told her plainly. She said that the Faulkners had been hunters of a certain kind of creature since before the Pilgrims, and that she was one, and that her father knew and her grandfather Ezekiel had been another. She asked whether Georgia wished to learn. Georgia said that she would like to know a great deal more about it, but that she did not think she would be any use with a gun. Her mother, who had been studying the child for twelve years, said that she had hoped that she would say so. She said that the Ledger had a great many places in it, and that the whole work could not be done by watchers. Somebody had to keep the books. At fourteen she was sent back to New Orleans to Zoe Delacroix, in the charge of a steamboat captain, with a trunk and a letter, to learn the healing plants and what else the old house had to teach. She arrived on a hot October day in 1854, the year after the great fever, and was put to work at once. She learned the garden, the labels and the jars, and she learned a good deal more from sitting in the corner of the shop, in the afternoons, among the drying leaves, and listening to Zoe and her callers. She was a fast and accurate learner. She did not have the herbalist's knack of the healing hand, but she had something else, which was a memory for what was said and who had said it. She could repeat, a week later, the whole of a conversation in a doorway. She was asked to do so a number of times, and always got it right. It was in the garden, in the spring of 1856, that she met Baptiste Delacroix, the herbalist's only son, who was mending a trellis and who very nearly put his chisel through his own hand. She looked up from a bed of boneset and offered to hold the other end. He was eighteen, a large, slow, fair young man, in the last year of his apprenticeship as a joiner, and she was sixteen, and it was noted by Zoe, who had observed the matter over a cup of tea, that the two of them had found a great deal to do in the garden that year. They were married in 1860, on a fine day in early May. Zoe gave them the house and the garden, and moved herself to a small place round the corner, with a window on a courtyard of her own. Georgia opened her school in the autumn of that year, in the front room of the house on Royal Street. It began with six children. It was a small, plain, strict and cheerful place, in which the pupils sat at benches that their teacher's husband had made, and learned their letters in English and French, sums on a slate and a short, practical course of geography with a great deal of river in it. She taught them what she knew. She did not raise her voice. She had an unnerving habit, when a child was telling a lie, of looking at it with a large, calm, interested expression until it stopped, and the lie, she was reported to have said, would usually stop without being asked. By the end of the second year she had thirty. Her father died in the spring of 1862, of kidney failure, upriver at Louisville, and she could not go to the funeral. The Union fleet had taken the city in April, the river was closed, the blockade made a mockery of the post, and she had a school of thirty to keep. She wrote a letter to her mother, eight pages long, in a small clear hand, and it was carried through the lines by a Ledger cousin, in the lining of a coat. It was, her mother said, the letter that she had kept longest. In it she said that she had never known her father to be unkind to anyone, and that she hoped to be as good a parent as he had been, when the time came, and that she was teaching the children of the Quarter to sing the verse about the Natchez packet, which she had from him, in a mixture of English and French. Her own children came in the middle of the war. Elias Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1863 and lived until 1914, and Nettie Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1864 and lived until 1925. She brought them up in the school, among the benches, and they were, as children of teachers will be, terrible pupils and excellent teachers of one another. Neither was a hunter. Elias became a cooper's agent on the levee and married, in 1887, Amelie, the daughter of the slayer Monique Delacroix, of the Ledger's Louisiana chapter, which joined, as his grandmother Zoe had hoped, the two halves of the family. Nettie became a schoolteacher like her mother, and ran the school for a time after her. Her work for the Ledger was done in the schoolroom, and it was the work of a clerk. A hunter in New Orleans needed to know which families had moved, which children had stopped coming to school, which neighbours had lately fallen ill and which houses had new tenants, and the schoolmistress knew all of it before anyone. She kept a register of pupils, in which, beside each name, in a cipher of her own, she noted the state of the household. The cousins called at the school for the register every Friday evening. She had by then a second, small register, bound in green, that she kept in the drawer of the master's desk, and that was not shown to anyone. In the sixty years of its existence the whole of it was never read by more than four people. Zoe Delacroix died in 1874, in the small house with the courtyard, and Georgia nursed her, as she had been nursed herself, with great gentleness, through the last winter. In the great fever summer of 1878 she closed the school and worked in a ward in the Quarter, alongside the old herbalist Clara Alden, who said afterward that she had never seen a pair of steadier hands. Her mother lived on to the turn of the century, in Louisville, and came down every second winter, and sat in the school at the back, in a black dress, looking at the room as only The Hollow Rook could look at it. She was, in those years, often heard to remark that the school was the best-watched room in the city. Georgia died in the autumn of 1908, of a stroke, in the schoolroom, at the desk, at the end of an ordinary afternoon. She had just asked a small boy to read aloud. The class, who were trained, finished the page and then sat in silence until the janitor came. She was buried in the family tomb on Basin Street, in the old city's fashion, above ground. Her husband outlived her by fourteen years and kept her desk exactly as she had left it. Georgia Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the schoolmistress of Royal Street, the daughter of the Hollow Rook who kept the books. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and teachers of the Red Ledger, the people who did not watch or hunt but who remembered, and whose record of who had come to the door was worth more, in a bad year, than a good gun.