Josephine Delacroix

Charmer slayer of House of Delacroix, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Gentle Latch. Craft: Vieux Carre Tracing.

Josephine Delacroix was born in 1918 at Mobile, Louisiana, and lived sixty-three years as a typist and a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix in New Orleans. The family book knows her as The Gentle Latch, a name for the catch on a door that closes so softly that the person inside does not hear it, and it classes her as a Charmer, a hunter who wins what she wants by kindness, conversation and good manners, and who is at her most dangerous when she is being agreeable. Her craft was Vieux Carre Tracing, the art of following a creature back through the courtyards, lodgings and alleys of the old city to the place where it first took a room. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She was called in 1951, on a road at dusk, when the fear left the animals before it left the people. She was the daughter of the railway clerk and slayer Aristide Delacroix, The Fallow Ledger, who was her mentor, and in 1937 she married the carpenter and slayer Norman Thorne. She died in 1981 of kidney failure, aged sixty-three. Mobile, Louisiana, was a railway halt and a store, and not the port in Alabama, a distinction that she explained to strangers for the whole of her life. Her father had been born there, to a family that kept the flour and the stamps, and when his wife was within a month of her time in the autumn of 1918, and the influenza had begun to close the schools of New Orleans, he sent her up the line to his mother. It was a sensible precaution, and it was the one thing that anyone ever did in that epidemic that could be called prudent. The baby was born in a back room behind the post office, in the first week of October, in a thunderstorm that put out the lamps on the platform, and was delivered by a neighbour who had delivered the mail for thirty years and who said that it made little difference. She was a small, solemn, sharp-featured infant who looked at the ceiling as though she were reading it. She was home in New Orleans before Christmas, on the Burgundy Street, in the care of an aunt, and her father, who had a post at the freight offices and a good deal of night work, brought her up in the manner of a clerk. That is to say, he had a system. She was fed at six, bathed at seven and read to at eight, from the shipping column of the Picayune, because it was the only literature in the house. She could read a bill of lading at five. She stood in doorways, with her hands folded, and watched whoever was in the room, and her father, who had been exactly the same, observed the habit with the gloomy pleasure of a man who has found out that his shortcomings are heritable. He taught her to read a room before she could ride a streetcar. The craft that he had was Salon Reading, which was no part of her inheritance, as it turned out. She had something else. What she had was the knack of being liked. It showed early. At seven she persuaded a grocer, who had never in his life given credit, to let the neighbours' children have a penny's worth of peppermints on account. She had a low voice, a straight back and a way of listening that seemed to the person talking to be the most flattering thing that had ever happened to them. Her father watched this with a quiet alarm. A hunter, he said, who gets what she wants by being liked is a hunter who is going to need very good judgment. She replied that she had it. She was twelve. She finished the convent school in 1935, took the commercial course and in the same summer was hired as a typist in a law office on Carondelet Street, at a wage that kept her in shoes and gloves and in the occasional glass of lemonade on a gallery. She was fast and accurate and not very interested in the law. She was interested in the clients. She typed the deeds of half the Vieux Carre, and she learned, in the course of three years, who owned what, who had owned it before and in which of the old houses on Royal and Chartres the title had changed hands, rather too often, in the same night. She met Norman Thorne in the spring of 1936, at a church supper at the end of Dauphine Street, where he was putting up a plank shelf for the ladies' guild. He was a carpenter, a stern, dark, silent young man of twenty-one, the grandson of a Kentucky drover and the elder son of a telegraph operator, who measured twice, spoke once and was, by general agreement, the best joiner in the Marigny. She watched him for a quarter of an hour. She then remarked that the shelf was an eighth of an inch out of true. He took out a level. It was. He said that he had meant to say so himself, and she said that she was sure he had. They were married in 1937, in the church at the end of Dauphine Street, in the same week as her cousin Howard, in a morning ceremony in which the bridegroom was observed to be looking at the doors and the bride, with a smile, at the congregation. Her father made a long, moving and perfectly accurate speech. Norman was a slayer, and had been called young. She knew it from the start. She did not mind, and she said so, and for the next fourteen years she was a hunter's wife and a typist and nothing else, in a rented half-double in the Marigny, with a window box and a sewing machine, and a husband who went out at night with a kit of tools and a pistol and came home at dawn to make the coffee. She kept his hours. She kept his shirts. In the war years, when the city filled with soldiers and every lodging house on Decatur and Rampart was crowded to the stairs, she sat up nights in the kitchen with a lamp and a street map, and learned the old Quarter with the dull thoroughness of a woman who has nothing else to do, and who is a good deal sharper than she looks. The calling came on a road in the autumn of 1951, at dusk, on the River Road above Destrehan, where she had driven with her father in the old Ford to see a cousin about a christening. The light was going. The cane was down, and the fields lay yellow in the stubble, and the road ran straight between a drainage ditch and the levee. She noticed that a field of cattle that had been grazing quietly beside it had lain down together, in a line, with their heads toward the road, and that none of them was chewing. A dog on a porch, which had been barking, had stopped. A flock of grackles went up out of a pecan tree all at once, without a sound. She stopped the car. Her father, who was seventy, looked at the cattle, then at her, and said, quite gently, that the animals had known first, and that the people would be the last, and that she had better get out and have a look at the road. She did. A man was standing in it, in a good grey suit, perhaps a hundred yards ahead, and he was, she saw, not casting a shadow in the last of the light. The fear, she found, left the animals before it left the people, and she was the only person on that road who had not yet noticed that she was afraid. She spoke to him. It was her whole technique, and it was enough. She walked up the road, in her good coat, and told him, in her low and level voice, that he looked tired. He said that he was. She said that it was a long way from wherever he had started, and that she was sure that he would like to sit down. She was within twenty feet of him when her father, behind her, fired once, at the exact moment that the man's face began to change. She was trained by her father, in the evenings, for the last seven years of his life. He taught her the Quarter as a thief knows it, by its keys. She added the rest. Vieux Carre Tracing, which she devised, was the discipline of going back, of taking a creature that had been seen in a single place and following it by the porter's gossip, the landlady's grievance and the delivery boy's laziness to the very first lodging that it had taken in the city, since a vampire, she said, is a creature of habits and always goes home to its first house. She would walk into a courtyard, ask the old woman on the gallery for a glass of water, stay an hour and leave with an address. She was never refused. The Gentle Latch was her father's name for it. He said that the door never knew it had been opened until it was too late. Aristide died in 1958, in a car on Canal Street, and she took over his house and his ledgers. She went on hunting for twenty-three years, with Norman, in the old Quarter and in the bayou parishes, and they worked together after 1960, he with his tools and she with her talk. She weathered Hurricane Betsy in 1965 in the attic of the Burgundy Street house, with the Ledger in a tin trunk and a pistol in her lap, and came out of it with the trunk dry. She worked as a typist until 1976, at a shipping company on Poydras Street, when her kidneys began to fail, and she spent the last five years in the house on Burgundy Street, in a chair by the shutters, on a regimen that she described as a punishment for the sins of a clerk's daughter. She died in the spring of 1981, aged sixty-three, of kidney failure, with her husband holding her hand. Norman, who was sixty-six, closed the shutters himself. Josephine Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Gentle Latch, the typist who talked her way through a hundred doors and never once forced one. In the Slayerverse she stands for the charmers of the House of Delacroix, the hunters who proved that in the old city a courteous word, a glass of water and a good memory for an address could find a vampire quicker than any pistol.