Julian Umland

Throughout her life, Julian has been short, plump, and possessed of light blue eyes and very dark black-brown hair. Beyond these basics, however, the Julian who left Sonora was nearly unrecognizable as the tomboyish eleven-year-old in uniformly second- or third-hand clothes who had arrived seven years earlier. After coming into a significant sum of money in her teens, Julian - who had always allowed her mother to determine what she wore and when she wore it - began to make tentative gestures toward determining her own style, first indulging in brand-new clothes, then in brighter colors and patterns than her mother would ever pick, and finally beginning to wear shaping garments at all and to wear dresses longer than it took to walk to Mass, attend Mass, and then walk back home and change. As an adult, she has largely adopted a mid-century influenced look, which she feels attractive and comfortable in and which goes well with pearls, which are her favorite jewels: her engagement ring was a large pearl centered in a sunburst of diamonds, her engagement gift from her husband’s family was a magnificent 100-inch pearl rope, and her favorite earrings, after having her ears pierced at age twenty, are a pair of large off-white pearls set with diamonds. Her wedding gift from her husband was also comprised of pearls - two princess-length strands, the shorter one composed of silky white South Sea pearls and the longer of darkly opalescent black Tahitian pearls. She wears these necklaces most days, along with a stack of four thin, gold-plate bangles of no real value which she bought on their honeymoon. Her husband, recognizing the sentimental attitude behind this choice, accordingly adjusted his gift-giving ideas; though he did buy her an expensive pair of fan-shaped diamond earrings for their first Christmas, his other gifts have been a citrine bracelet and pendant-brooch for her birthday that same year, nodding to her background as a Teppenpaw, and a ruby brooch for their first anniversary in July.

Julian grew up in Alberta, Canada, in a suburb a stone's throw and world away from the University of Calgary. Though she, like all four of her brothers, was adopted, she had the distinction of both being the only girl in the family and the child her parents named themselves, her mother choosing to name a girl 'Julian' in honor of Dame Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic and the first documented female English theologian. Her adoptive mother, an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, took religion extremely seriously, and Julian grew up attending Mass almost every morning. As Alison Umland had also been an academic and an Anglican before becoming convinced that it was God's will for her to settle down and raise Catholic children, these excursions were followed by breakfast and then spending much of the day working through a rigorous homeschool curriculum, studies punctuated by tea breaks and various chores around the house and garden. In the evenings, after her father came home, Julian and her brothers were allowed to play or read as they chose, with Alison often reading aloud to the family while Stephen and Paul played cards or board games, little Joe worked on puzzles or cat's cradle, John either listened to the reading or stared off into space, and Julian played chess with her father. This repetitive, highly insular family life took a hit when Julian was fifteen, after her biological father, a wealthy pureblood named Richard Crowley, died and left the vast majority of his property to her out of a mix of genuine affection for her biological mother and a desire to spite his actual wife, whom he disliked intensely. Julian found herself plunged into a legal contest of the will from Richard's ambitious nephews, which she was rescued from by his cousin Bertram, a politician who never quite explained his motives for helping her out to her but who managed to soften her attitude toward that branch of the Crowley family enough for her to cautiously enter its social circle.

Julian's life at Sonora was largely unremarkable. Sorted into Teppenpaw, she quickly made friends with her classmate Charles "Charlie" Boxton-Fox-Reynolds, performed acceptably but unremarkably in her classes, and was made Teppenpaw prefect in her fifth year. The only wrinkles in seven years at school were the Charms Facility Incident in her fourth year and the Satori incident in her seventh, both of which led to significant changes in her relationship with her younger brother John which eventually contributed to their temporary estrangement and Julian becoming an extremely unwilling accessory to the systematic subversion of the Statute of Secrecy John had been engaged in since age ten with the one neighbor of theirs Julian actively, for reasons she couldn't even identify herself, happened to dislike.

Shortly after leaving Sonora, Julian met William Welles, a low-ranking pureblood second son, at one of her cousin Bertram's brother Eleazar's parties. He charmed Julian, who was mildly dazed by his good looks and delighted with his apparent hanging on her every word, easily, and the two soon developed a romantic relationship, which progressed to engagement and culminated in marriage when Julian was twenty-two. Almost immediately, however, the relationship took a blow when William discovered that, on the advice of her cousin Lenore (who, unbeknownst to her, was William's former fiancee) she had taken steps to minimize his legal claims to her property before the wedding. As, unbeknownst to her, he only married her in order to obtain rights to said property and then divorce her as quickly, quietly, and unfairly as possible, this proved an unexpected and unwelcome shock to Julian, who was used to William acquiescing to her will with minimal resistance, and provoked the first big marital fight. William was further dismayed by the birth of their daughter, Cecilia Marie (almost instantly contracted to "Cecily," to the point that Cecily herself does not know she has any other name than just Cecily - unless one counts various pet names, of which she recognizes an abundance), both because the child presented another barrier between him and Julian's considerable wordly good and because Julian further arranged for the little girl's godfather, Julian's brother Joe, to act as her financial guardian in the event anything happened to Julian.