Ida Howe

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Cold Stave. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

Ida Howe was born in 1862 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and lived forty-four years as a boarding-house keeper in the French Quarter of New Orleans and, from 1891, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Cold Stave, a name that put together the hard temper of her watching and the barrel stave that she was supposed to have used once on a drunk. She was a Spy, which in the Faulkner sense means a hunter who works by patient observation and leaves the gun to the last, and her craft was Long-Watch Tracking, the art of following a quarry by staying where it will pass, sometimes for weeks. Her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was the elder daughter of the boatman Henry Howe and of the boarding-house keeper and slayer Ellen Putnam Faulkner, The Sable Shuttle, and the sister of Sarah Howe. She did not marry, and left no children. She died in 1906 in a fire that was set to draw her out, aged forty-four. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. The birthplace was a matter of family jokes, since nobody in her household had any business in Lafayette. The town was a market village on the Vermilion, in the prairie country west of the Atchafalaya, a place of a church, a courthouse and a great many cattle. Her mother, Ellen, was in her eighth month in the winter of 1861 and 1862, and when Henry took a charter on the lower Mississippi with his packet, she went with him for the ride, meaning to see a cousin of the Ledger who had a farm on the Vermilion and to be home by the spring. The child was in a hurry. She was born in February, in the cousin's back bedroom, on a night of hard frost, to the great surprise of everyone but the midwife, and her father, who had been out on the river, arrived at dawn to find that he had a daughter and that her mother was already asking for the ledger. They came home up the river in March, before the Union fleet reached New Orleans, and Ida went into the brick house on Short Street at Lexington in a hatbox, having travelled nine hundred miles in the first six weeks of her life, which she said afterwards was the last time that she had been in a hurry. She was seven when her mother died, in the autumn of 1869, of a fever caught in a plague house at Covington, and she was told everything in the last week, at her own request, by a woman who did not believe in leaving a child to guess. Ellen told her what a ledger was, and what a watch was, and that the trick of the work was not to do things but to be where things would happen. Then Henry took both daughters home to Frankfort and raised them above the landing. Ida grew into a long, dark, silent girl who could sit at the bow of a packet for an hour without speaking, and who took an interest in a great many things that did not seem to call for interest, such as who came down the gangplank, and in what order, and what they looked at first. She kept her mother's ledger in a biscuit tin. She added nothing to it for twenty years. She went south in her twenties. The Ledger's Louisiana chapter had a vacancy. A boarding house in the Quarter, on Burgundy Street, near the cotton exchange and the wharves, was offered to her by a cousin who was leaving for Texas, and she took it in 1888 with a small loan from her father, a box of her mother's keys and a strong sense that she was supposed to. It was a tall, thin, damp house of four floors, with a courtyard, a banana tree and eleven rooms let to cotton clerks, river men and a retired madam. She ran it as her mother had run the one at Short Street, with a ledger in which she wrote, against each lodger's name, a single word. She was severe in it, but honest. She wrote careful, wrong, kind, and, for the retired madam, who paid her rent in advance and never lied, good. It was the work of the house that led her to the hunt. A boarding-house keeper sees everyone go in and out, and the Quarter in the eighties was a place where a great many people came in and went out again without leaving any record. She observed a lodger who did not eat. She observed a room that was always locked on the sunny side, and a cat that would not go near the stairs. She began to note the hours at which people came home. She sat up at night on the gallery with a rug over her knees and a dark lantern, and she watched the street, in the long, patient, unhurried way that her mother had taught her, and was not surprised when, in a few months, the watching began to have a shape. Her cousins of the Ledger, calling at her kitchen on a Sunday, noticed the notebooks, and said nothing, and were careful to leave her a chair. The call itself came in the autumn of 1891, in the fields. She had gone back to the Lafayette country for a cousin's wedding, and was persuaded, on the morning after, into the saddle to join the hunt that the prairie families kept up in the old Creole fashion, with a dozen hounds, a horn and a great deal of brandy. It went out at dawn across the stubble. She stayed at the back, as she always did, and saw, at about nine o'clock, a thing that nobody else saw, which was that the hounds, which had been running in full cry across the long field toward the coulee, had stopped. They came back, one at a time, out of the mist, with their tails between their legs, and stood in a ring around her horse and shook. The huntsman did not come back. She sat in the saddle for some minutes looking at the coulee, and then she rode down to it, alone, at a walk, and found his horse, standing quiet, with the reins on the ground. She did not go in. She took note of the ground, the wind and the hour, and sat her horse at the edge of the brush, and waited. It was the first of the long watches. She waited four hours, and then the creature came out of the coulee with the huntsman's coat on, and she put two silver-tipped stakes in it from the saddle with her pistol held on the last one. The family said afterwards that she had been waiting all her life for the morning when she would be allowed to sit still and be right. She went home to Burgundy Street and wrote, in her mother's ledger, for the first time in twenty years, a single line. It said: seen. Long-Watch Tracking was what she made of it. She did not chase. She found the place where the thing would be, and then she sat in it, sometimes in a doorway, sometimes in a rented room above a cotton press and sometimes, for eleven nights, in a rowing boat under the cotton wharf at the foot of Esplanade Avenue, with a flask of coffee and a revolver on her knee. She saw the Storyville district rise, in the later nineties, out of the old tenderloin, and its trumpets and its new vices, and knew that a good deal of the quarry had found in it a warmer kitchen. She stayed on the roof. She was credited with nineteen vampires in fifteen years, and nobody recorded how many hours it took. She also kept her lodgers, the yellow fever summers and all, and her rates did not change. The end was a fire. She was getting close, in the spring of 1906, to a nest that had taken up residence in a shuttered warehouse on the Dauphine side, and she had been sitting on it, in her own particular way, for three weeks. It was supposed afterwards that she had been noticed. One night in May, at two in the morning, the boarding house on Burgundy Street took fire at the bottom of the stairs, in three places at once, and a great many things were found to have been done to the doors. She got every one of her lodgers out. The last of them, the retired madam, said that Miss Howe had counted them out at the bottom of the stairs, by name, and then gone back in for the ledger. She came out again, and then went back for the cat, and the roof came down. She was forty-four. Her father, who was sixty-four, took the news at Frankfort without a sound, and died two years later. Her sister Sarah kept the biscuit tin. Ida Howe is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Cold Stave, the landlady of Burgundy Street who waited, who counted her lodgers out and who was worth more in a doorway than a squad on a horse. In the Slayerverse she stands for the watchers of the Red Ledger, the spies of patience who won by sitting still in the right place and who knew that a quarry always comes, sooner or later, to a lit window.