Rosalie Delacroix

Charmer slayer of House of Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Narrow Quill. Craft: Salon Reading.

Rosalie Delacroix was born in 1966 at Mobile, Louisiana, the railway halt and flour store in the river country that is not the port in Alabama, and lived fifty years as a seamstress in New Orleans and, from 1999, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes. The family book knows her as The Narrow Quill, after the little spool that carries the thread through a seam, and classes her as a Charmer, a hunter who goes in by invitation, who is welcome in every parlour and is never asked to leave until she has seen what she came to see. Her craft was Salon Reading, the art of reading a crowded room, a table or a party for the one person in it who is not what he appears, and her gear was a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was the only child of the diner waitress and slayer Marguerite Delacroix, The Cold Falcon, whose father the family papers do not name. In 1984 she married the high school coach and slayer Neil Butler Faulkner of the Red Ledger, and they had two daughters, Marguerite Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1987, and Susan Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1988, neither of whom was called. She died in 2016 in an ambush on a lonely road, aged fifty, three years before her mother. She was born in Mobile because her mother went home to be confined. The Delacroix of that branch had kept the flour and the stamps at the halt for sixty years, and Marguerite, who had been born in the back room of the same store in the winter of 1937, took the train from the city a fortnight before her time, with a bag, a book and no explanation, and lay in there, with the rain on the tin roof and the train for the coast running late. She did not say whose child it was, and the family, which knew better than to ask, brought the baby a christening robe and a recipe for pralines. The baby weighed seven pounds, cried for an hour and then, according to the storekeeper's wife, lay with her eyes open for a whole afternoon, watching the ceiling fan as though it were a conversation. Marguerite took her back to New Orleans within the month, to two rooms over a barber's shop on Rampart Street, with a hot plate, a window on the street and a neighbour who played the trumpet at night. She grew up to the sound of that trumpet through the wall, in a household of two, with a mother who worked double shifts at a Treme diner and came home with her feet in a basin. Marguerite saved enough from her tips to pay for school shoes and, for a while, a piano lesson, and Rosalie, who sat on the stool for a year with her mind on something else, was gently told by the teacher that her gifts lay elsewhere. They lay in the needle. Her mother took her at nine to the back room of a tailor on Dryades Street, a Sicilian widow named Mrs Lanza, who taught the child to thread a needle, to turn a hem and, above all, to take a measure. A measure, said Mrs Lanza, is the truth about a person, and the truth about a person is generally that he is not the size that he says. She went to work at sixteen, in 1982, as a fitter's helper in a shop on Magazine Street that made ball gowns, bridal dresses and the costumes of the Carnival krewes, and it was in the fitting room, with a tape measure round her neck and a mouth full of pins, that she found her second gift. A fitting room is a place of strange candour. A woman standing in a half-made dress, with a seamstress on her knees, will say what she would not say to a priest, and a man who has come to be measured for a tail coat will, in a quarter of an hour, tell you where he has been. Rosalie listened. She was a narrow, dark, quiet girl, with her mother's grey eyes and her mother's quick turn of the head, and she knew, without anybody telling her, that she was being told things because she was holding a pin. The cousins, hearing it, said that she had her mother's ear. Marguerite said that it was not her ear, it was her hands. A woman who is touching a person's body with a tape measure is a woman who is, for that moment, entirely trusted. She met Neil Butler Faulkner at a church supper in the Faubourg in the spring of 1983, where he stood against the wall with a plate of red beans and looked at the whole of the hall at once, in the manner of a man counting. She was seventeen. She said afterwards that she had noticed him because he was the only man in the room not looking at the food. He was twenty and not yet called, a tall, round-faced, quiet young man in a coat that did not fit, and she told him, with a straight face, that his left sleeve was an inch short and that she would be glad to fix it. It was some months before he was called, on a towpath, though neither of them knew it was coming. They were married in 1984, in the church in the Faubourg, with her mother Marguerite and his mother Josephine, in hats, standing side by side at the front and agreeing on everything. Josephine, who was a nurse and had waited at the end of a good many nights, sat with the young couple through the first of their winters with a kettle and a first-aid kit. She told Rosalie the truth about the Ledger, and Rosalie, who had known since fourteen what her mother was, told her that she had, in fact, been waiting for someone to say so. She was called in the autumn of 1999, in a cellar. She was thirty-three. A client on Prytania Street, a widow named Mrs Ravenel who had ordered a gown for a fortnight hence, had failed to come to a fitting, and Rosalie, who disliked to leave a dress unclaimed, took it round on a Tuesday afternoon, wrapped in tissue. The front door was unlocked. The parlour was in perfect order, with the chairs set in a circle and a tea service laid for six, and the whole house was as quiet as a church. She called. She went through the kitchen, where the stove was cold and the bread was on the board, and down the cellar steps with a lamp, and found the stores. They were all there. Forty jars of preserves stood on the shelves in neat rows and a side of ham hung from a hook, and a case of wine was stacked against the wall, and the whole of it was untouched, with the dust of a year upon it. The household was gone. There was Mrs Ravenel, a son, a daughter-in-law, two grandchildren and a cook, and not one of them was in the house, and the only mark in the whole of the cellar was the clean place on the floor where something had sat. She stood in the cellar for some time with the gown over her arm. Then she went back upstairs, into the parlour, and did what she did best, which was to read the room. She read the chairs in their circle, all turned inward to the one empty place. She read the tea service laid for six, though there had been seven in the household, and she saw that the seventh place was missing, as if the host had not wished to be seen to sit. She understood, in the way that a seamstress understands a garment that has been cut wrong, that the room had been arranged for a guest, and that the guest had been very well liked. She went home, put the gown in a wardrobe and sat down at her mother's kitchen table, and told Marguerite all of it. Her mother, who had been told by a tinker's cart in 1970, listened without interrupting and then said that she had been wondering when. Marguerite trained her. It took a winter. Salon Reading, as the Cold Falcon taught it, was the same art that she had practised from behind a pie case, but turned about, so that the reader sat in the room and not behind it. A hunter of the Charmer's kind is invited. She goes in, in a good dress, with a bag of work on her arm and a reason to be there, and she sits, and she reads the room. She reads who is not drinking, whose hands are too still, which guest is admired by the others a shade too much and which guest, in a long evening, has not once been touched. Rosalie, who had read a hundred fitting rooms, found that she had done it all her life. By the spring of 2000 she was in the parlours of the whole of the garden district as a seamstress, and out of them at the end of the evening as the sort of person that a vampire, having met her, did not remember. She carried a service pistol in her work bag, under the pins, and a silver-edged knife in the lining of her coat, and she was credited with twenty-two of the dead in seventeen years. On the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 she was in a fitting room on Magazine Street with a bride, and the whole of the shop went silent. In the summer of 2005 Hurricane Katrina and the flood that followed put the house in Gentilly under five feet of water, and the two of them, with a borrowed boat, took in thirty neighbours and a cat. She lost the sewing machine and kept the thimble. She rebuilt the front room and the trade, and in the years after the flood the city, which had lost half of its dressmakers, needed her, and she worked sixteen hours a day. She was killed in 2016 on a lonely road at night, in an ambush, at fifty, on a gravel levee road in the river parishes, coming home from a client. Neil buried her from the church in the Faubourg, and her mother Marguerite, who was seventy-nine, put on her apron the following morning and served the breakfast, and said afterwards that it was the only thing that she could think of to do with her hands. The thimble was found on the dresser. Her daughters have it. Rosalie Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Narrow Quill, the seamstress who read a room as she read a seam and who was welcome in every house in the city. In the Slayerverse she stands for the charmers of the old houses, the hunters who went in by invitation, with a measure and a pin, and who found the dead where the company was happiest.