Monique Delacroix

Slayer of House of Delacroix, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

Monique Delacroix was born in 1828 in Natchez, Louisiana, a river village in Natchitoches Parish, and lived sixty-five years as a shopkeeper and a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix in New Orleans. The family book knows her as The Plain Tally, a name that recalls the honest count that a shopkeeper keeps of what is owed, and it classes her as a Broker, a hunter who works through people, favours and information rather than through the gun. Her craft was Crowd Charm, the art of moving a crowd without seeming to, and her gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot. She was called in 1860, on a canal towpath at night, when a barge drifted in with its lamps still lit. She raised a daughter, Amelie Delacroix, who married into the Faulkner family in 1887, and she died in 1893 of old age, at sixty-five, having kept a small shop in the French Quarter for thirty-five years and having been, through all of them, the most trusted creditor in the parish. Natchez, Louisiana, in the year of her birth, was a cotton and river village on the Cane River, forty miles below the old Spanish and French post of Natchitoches, a place of Creole families, free people of colour, planters and their agents. It was not the famous Natchez of the Mississippi, which she had to explain to strangers for sixty years, but a small place of its own, with a church, a store, a ferry and a long line of live oaks along the bank. Her family, the Delacroix of the upper parishes, were a cadet branch of the great Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre, and they kept a general store at the crossroads. The family papers do not name her father or her mother, and the silence is an old Delacroix habit, but they say that her mother kept the books, and that Monique, who was the second of five, learned her sums at the counter. She was a short, round, dark-eyed girl, with a plain face, a level voice and an enormous talent for being believed. She did not exaggerate. She did not lie. She stood behind the counter at ten, in an apron that came to her ankles, and when a customer asked whether a bolt of cloth would wear well, she told him, and he bought it, and it did. She was a child who had discovered, without being told, that the quickest way to get on with people was to say what was true, in a friendly manner, in a place where they could all hear it. By twelve she was the person at whom arguments were directed. By fifteen she had settled, at the counter, a dispute between two planters over a boundary that a court had failed to resolve in six years. In 1850, at twenty-two, she went down the river to New Orleans. The family had an aunt in the Vieux Carre, a widow who kept a small shop on Royal Street, selling notions, thread, buttons, tobacco, sugar, candles and a good many things that had no particular name, and who wanted a girl she could trust. Monique kept the counter for ten years. It was a good school. The Quarter, in the 1850s, was the busiest small market in the country, with a population of Creoles, Americans, Irish, Germans, free people of colour and sailors from every port on the Gulf, and the shop saw all of them. She learned the languages. She learned who paid, and who did not, and who would and who could. She learned to say no in six different tongues, pleasantly, to a man who had been drinking. When her aunt died in 1855, she took over the shop. She kept a plain ledger, in a plain hand, with a column for what was owed and a column for what was promised and a third, narrower column, in pencil, for what had been said. It was the third column that made her famous. A shopkeeper who sells on credit to a whole quarter must know what is going on in it, and Monique, who was a patient listener, knew more than the parish priest. She knew who was in trouble and who was about to be. She knew who was buying what, and why, and who had stopped. She kept it all in her head, and in the pencil column, and used it sparingly. She would lend a man a dollar when he needed it. She would introduce two families who needed each other. She was, in a quarter in which everything was done by favour, the broker of half the small transactions in the street. She was called in 1860, on a night in October, in the third week of a dry spell. She had been to see a debtor on the far side of the new canal, and was walking home along the towpath at about eleven, with a lantern and a basket, when she saw a barge. It was drifting down the canal, with its lamps lit, its sails furled and no sound aboard. There was no steersman. The barge came slowly in, bumped against the bank at her feet and stopped, and she stood for a time looking at it. The lamps were still burning. A plate of supper was on the deck, half eaten. A cup had been knocked over, and the coffee was still warm. She climbed aboard, and went through it, cabin by cabin, and found that the crew of five had gone, with their boots, their coats and their money, and that the only things they had left were a few small marks on the deck rail, in a row, like a hand that had been gripping it, and a long, dark smear across the planks that led to the stern. She did what she was best at. She went home, woke a neighbour, then three, then a dozen, and within an hour she had, by means of no more than a voice and a manner, got the whole street out of bed, with lanterns, and posted on the towpath at forty-foot intervals. She did not tell them why. She said that a barge had been taken and that she wanted to know who had seen it. They told her. They told her, among other things, that a tall man in a long coat had been seen on the bank at dusk, and that he had not been seen since. It was the first time that the thing she was hunting had been surrounded by a crowd that did not know it was surrounded, and when, before dawn, it came out of the water, the neighbours, at the signal of a raised lantern, stood still in a circle and did not run. She fired six times. She said afterward that it was a thing that she had no business knowing how to do. The family of the Delacroix came to her three days later, and told her what she was. The House of Delacroix, who were Norman-French slayers of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes, had been watching the Quarter for a hundred and fifty years, and an elder cousin, who had seen the crowd on the towpath, had drawn his own conclusions. She was a Broker, he said. It was a rare thing, and valuable, and he was glad to have her. She gave him a bowl of soup and said that she would think about it. She was thinking, he noticed, of the account. Crowd Charm, in her practice, was a matter of finding the one thing that a hundred people had in common, and of saying it. She used it on a market crowd to empty a street in ninety seconds, and on a mob to divide it, and once, in a church, to bring two hundred mourners to silence in order that a single man might be taken out of a back pew. She called her method the plain tally, a thing that was honest and that everyone could see. She was credited with some forty vampires over thirty-three years, of which she took six herself. The rest she arranged. It was said of her that she was the only hunter in the city who had never been seen to hurry. Her daughter was born in 1866. She was called Amelie, and was born in Natchez, at her grandmother's house on the Cane River, to which Monique had gone for the confinement at the end of the war, because it was quiet. The child's father is not named in the family papers. Monique brought her back to New Orleans at six weeks, and brought her up behind the counter, in the same aprons, at the same ledger, and taught her the same thing, which was to say what was true. Amelie, who became a bookkeeper, was not called to the work. In 1887, at twenty-one, she married Elias Faulkner Delacroix, the son of Baptiste Delacroix and of Georgia Faulkner, and thereby joined the bloodline of the Red Ledger to the House of her mother. Monique, who had wondered whether the match would work, went to the wedding with a small, satisfied, carefully accounted smile. She lived to see her grandson Robert, born in 1889, and to hear that a second was on the way. She gave up the shop in 1890, and the counter and the ledger went to Amelie, and she sat in a chair on the gallery of the house behind it, watching the street, with a cup. She had never stopped. On a summer night in 1892, at sixty-four, she took the revolver out from under her cushion, walked to the corner and cleared the street in three minutes for a thing that her daughter never saw. She died in the winter of 1893, at sixty-five, of old age, in the chair, with a pencil in her hand. The column beside her last entry was blank. Monique Delacroix is remembered in the House of Delacroix as The Plain Tally, the shopkeeper who moved crowds and kept honest books. In the Slayerverse she stands for the brokers of the Red Ledger's cousins, the slayers who won the war of the street not with a gun but with a counter, a column of figures and the plain, patient truth.