Monica Delacroix

Thief slayer of House of Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Gentle Seal. Craft: Candle Warding.

Monica Delacroix was born in 1960 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in that city, where she has waited tables on the morning shift of a Magazine Street diner for more than forty years and, since 1985, has been a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix. The family book knows her as The Gentle Seal, the sleek head that rises quietly out of dark water and sees everything without seeming to look, and classes her as a Thief, a hunter who works by entering where she is not invited, taking what a creature keeps and leaving before the house knows it has been visited. Her craft is Candle Warding, the setting of lit candles in a pattern, as a ring, a line or a cross, that a creature of the old sort will neither cross nor leave, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She is the only child of the bookkeeper and slayer Victorine Delacroix, The Plain Cairn, who was also her mentor, and whose family papers do not name her father. In 1992 she married the restaurateur Daniel Faulkner, born in 1963, who inherited the Red Ledger and the family's work, and they had one daughter, Grace Faulkner, born in 1994, who is a slayer in her turn. She comes of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes, and through her husband's line she belongs to the Red Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. She was raised in the Marigny, over her great-aunt's grocery, in a household of books and boats, and she was rowing at four. Her mother, who kept the ledgers of a firm of ship chandlers by day and robbed the camps of the dead by night, put her in the bow of a flat boat at nine and asked her where the water was going, and the child, who had been listening to the old men on the dock, said that it was going where the wind let it. Victorine wrote the date in her ledger. The girl learned to pole a pirogue in the cuts of the marsh, to read the temperature of the water by putting her wrist in it and to tell a duck blind that was in use from one that had been shut for years by the way the reeds leaned. She was a round-faced, soft-spoken, deceptively easy-looking child who made friends in every shop in the quarter, and the quality which served her best, and which her mother noticed at eleven, was that she was almost never noticed herself. A neighbour once said that Monica could stand in the middle of a room for an hour and be asked, at the end of it, whether she was waiting for someone. It was a fine gift for a thief. She was called in the summer of 1985, beside a river ford, when a traveller failed to leave the water. She was twenty-five and had taken a Sunday off from the diner, as she did once a month, to go out with her mother to a camp on a shell road in St Bernard Parish that Victorine had been watching. The road crossed a slow brown creek by a gravel ford. They had left the car on the bank and were walking down to the boat, when a man came along the road from the other side, a thin man in a good grey suit and a wide hat, carrying a small bag, and stepped into the ford at the edge. He walked in until the water was at his chest. He stood. He said, in a quiet courteous voice, that he was waiting for the tide, though the creek had none. Then he stood for a quarter of an hour, facing them, and did not come up the bank. A man who walks into a creek in August will come out, Victorine said afterwards, in a hurry. This one did not. Monica, who had been looking at his hat, saw that the brim was perfectly dry, and that the water about him did not move, as water moves round a man who has weight. She heard herself say that he was not going to come out, and she heard her mother say, in the voice of a woman reading a column, that she had been wondering when the child would see it. They went back to the car. At dusk they came back, with a bag of candles. Candle Warding was the craft that she took from that evening. She had not planned it. She had been carrying the candles because her mother, who did not like a dark camp, had put them in the bag, and when the man in the grey suit came up at last out of the water, at the fall of night, and began, quite politely, to walk towards the camp, she did what a girl of the parish does when a stranger comes to the door in the dark, and set a candle in the road. She set another. She set eleven in a half-ring, across the shell road and down to the water's edge, each a hand's breadth from the last, and lit them in order with a pocket lighter, her mother holding the lamp. The man in the suit stopped at the line. He stood, with the candlelight on the dry brim of his hat, and he looked at the flames in the way that a man looks at a locked door. He did not cross. He turned, and he did not go back to the water, because there was a cross of candles at the creek, which her mother had set while she was watching the road. They took him at dawn, with the sun at his back, in a ring that he could not leave. Victorine said that it was the neatest piece of work she had seen in thirty years, and that the child had done it by instinct. The Gentle Seal learned the rest from her mother, in a long, patient apprenticeship that Victorine conducted entirely at the kitchen table. The patterns of the ring, the cross, the line and the closed knot, the length of a taper, the way that the wind in a marsh bends a flame, the difference between a candle that will hold and a candle that will merely burn were taught in an evening a week. The theft was her mother's own. Victorine, The Plain Cairn, took the creature's earth and its pocketbook, and Monica, who learned the entry from her, took the same things and then, with a candle, the creature's will to leave. Her mother's twenty-eight were hers alone, and Monica's own count, in thirty-odd years, stands at twenty-one. After her mother's death in 1998, of kidney failure, at sixty-seven, she kept the stones. Her mother's tin box, with its twenty-eight, is in the drawer of her bedside table, and beside it, in a small blue box, are her own. She had been a waitress since 1978, on the mornings, at the Blue Plate on Magazine Street, where the cook in those years was a young man called Leonard Washington and the evening waitress, from 1981, a Faulkner girl called Lorraine, and she says that a waitress is a thief by another name, in that she walks into a room full of strangers, sees what they are carrying and goes away having been given a tip. She kept the shift because of the hours. She wished to be at home by two, when her mother, who by then was ill, needed the key, and, later, when her daughter came home from school. It was at the diner, in the spring of 1991, that she met Daniel Faulkner. He was twenty-seven, a tall, quiet, kind, red-haired man with a bad back and a good palate, the son of the lineman Roy Robichaux and the schoolteacher Marguerite Faulkner, who had come in for the breakfast and had asked her, in a perfectly level voice, whether the coffee was strong enough to wake a sleeper. She said that it depended what kind of sleeper. He said, a deep one. She poured him a second cup. He was a cook by trade, and he opened a small restaurant of his own in the Marigny that autumn, and the two of them were married the following year, at a small wedding in the church on the bayou, in the summer, with Victorine, who was very ill and very pleased, in a blue dress and a great hat, in the front pew. Daniel was not a hunter. He had been told what the family was at fifteen, by his mother, and had decided that his part of it was to keep the books. When Marguerite died in 2011, she left the Red Ledger to him, and the stakes and the drill-book went to his sister Ada, and Monica, who had been waiting for it for twenty years, found that she now had a husband who kept a hundred years of the family's records in a restaurant safe. Grace came in 1994, in the same church. She was a quiet, steady child, in the line of her mother and her grandmother, who at nine could say where the water was going, and she was called, in her own time, in her own way, and takes the work as her mother does, as a form of tact. Daniel's restaurant, which had never been large, lost its dining room in the flooding after Katrina in August 2005 and was rebuilt by the cousins in four months, and in the pandemic years it fed the neighbourhood, from a window, by the pot. In the attacks of September 2001 Monica had been at the counter at seven, with a coffee-pot, and she remembers that every customer who came in that morning sat at the counter, not at a booth, and spoke to the people on either side. She is sixty-six, round, white-haired and soft-spoken still, and she waits the same tables on the same mornings, a hunter whom no one in the diner has ever suspected of anything more than slow service. Her candles are in a canvas bag under the counter, beside the pencils and the napkins, and she says that she has never once been asked what they are for. Monica Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Gentle Seal, the waitress who set eleven candles across a road and kept a man in a grey suit on the wrong side of them till dawn. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who worked by stealth and a small light, who took what the dead kept and left the rest to the morning, and who proved that a thief, if she is patient and kind, may be the gentlest keeper of the Ledger there is.