After an air crash had claimed her parents Felicity Lord was taken in by her uncle. She was an only child, seven at the time. Milly undertook, reluctantly, to ensure her proper upbringing and education. Milly seemed to instinctively, and conveniently understand that you could present a menu to children but could not choose the items for them. He provided whatever resources she might need, but let her decide, perhaps, more accurately, let her fall into whatever made her happy. Much of her subsequent uncommon sanguinity in the face of extraordinary events has much to do with Milly’s opportune disinterest.
All his solicitous behaviour notwithstanding, Milly did not actually love Felicity since he was no more capable of such feelings towards another human than was a child. He kept a mental tally of where people ranked in his social ledger. Being genetic kin, she was automatically near the top of the heap and would less easily be sacrificed if that need arose than, say, his wife, who shared no genetic material with him. Milly was perfectly qualified to bludgeon his way up the food chain; a primordial being, fully equipped with modern skills, predatory intelligence and resourceful cunning to most efficiently pursue his fully defined self-interest. He was a poster boy for the selfish gene notion.
At 24 Felicity had completed her Ph.D. in medieval archaeology and, four years on, she was taking up a tenure track position at the University of Montreal. It was during post-doctoral research for an article on the Cathar heresy that she found Abelard. It was also then that she took her distance from friends and family, including her uncle. She remained in Europe for almost four years, keeping communications to bare essentials. Milly, as he had done for most of her life, had let her be, providing anything she wanted with no questions asked. Such uncharacteristic extravagance had partly to do with his trust in her good sense and much to do with the great deal of time he needed to tend to his own needs. Even when she asked him to use his influence to shoehorn someone he did not know into a well known b-school, he indulged her.
To the extent that most people would not turn their heads to take a lingering look at her, it would be misleading to describe Felicity as a beautiful woman. Her beauty, like a favourite work of art, only became apparent with familiarity. She never tampered with her natural features. No makeup. Her hair was black and her skin not quite swarthy, and not quite white. She had a broad high forehead and dark eyes, widely set, like a ruminant rather than a carnivore. She had a slight overbite, protruding her upper lip with enough charm to mute the rakish flare of her nostrils. Although she had a penchant for rich foods, a severe fitness program kept her strong and agile.
Unlike Milly, she overtly shunned the visible trappings that wealth could buy, meeting only her needs, which she deliberately kept at a modest level. True, during the past four years she had drawn heavily on her family’s substantial resources, as the care and feeding of a man who believed he was present at the battle of Poitiers was not done on a shoestring budget.
It was not easy, taking from Milly. Businesslike, is the way she might have described her relationship with Uncle Milly. While she mainly stayed out of his affairs and so had only a superficial knowledge of his world, she had no illusions. It was one populated with the fast, hard people that made her uncomfortable. They lacked what she could only describe as sincerity. She never got the impression they actually believed what they said about those they dealt with in the various corners of the world where VBI had interests. That they wished they could lower the mortality rates at their mining operations, offer better terms to the poor through their financial concerns, make their drugs safer or lament there was so much poverty, not that they had any hand in that.
Felicity felt she was a better human being than Milly and his crowd but scoffed at the suggestion that she was somehow saintly. Although a product of natural selection, operating within the same bounds as all other human beings – yearning for status, a predisposition to mistrust, a trait often hidden in most people by stupid gullibility or advanced greed, and a propensity to competition - she did, though, like to think of her own evolutionary baggage as something less shabby than that of those slithering around Milly’s part of the human swampland. In fairness, though, there were great differences in degree. The overt excesses to which much of her uncle’s circle were driven, to feed a craving for status, found little equivalent in Felicity. This did not mean that she was not also motivated by a need to have more than others, only that she found its expression in other ways. A simple vehicle for transportation was all she required, but it would be transporting a Ph.D. with a position at a good university.
Although Felicity could have access to most anything another with her resources might wish for, she had learned from watching her uncle that more was an endless, potholed road, while enough was a comfortable absolute. It was this rule of happy parsimony that guided almost all she undertook. It was as close to an exact regulator of physical and mental equilibrium as could be found. Without a driving ambition for more, great stress was mostly a stranger to Felicity.
She did have one source of uncommon anxiety. Dilemmas that made it difficult to clearly distinguish between principle and intrigue could throw her into prolonged, paralyzing periods of self revulsion. And when doubt would finally disappear she’d soak lavishly in moments of great personal satisfaction. Balanced objectivity was so dear to her, she would be dominated by questions of equity to the exclusion of all else. For those who saw her as fearless, she was at times stalked by the fear of being unfair.
Felicity was rarely a fish out of water. She could appear comfortable and perfectly in place for any circumstance. At receptions for the really-full-of-self-importance, at which Milly requested her charm or at fashion events immersed in the vapid small talk of the incredibly-full-of-self-importance, there was nothing that made Felicity stand out other than her unstinting and enthusiastic participation. She may have wished to be elsewhere at these times, but she did accept her responsibility to deal respectfully with all the other human beings on her small planet.
It was this Felicity that became the accidental partner of the enigmatic Abelard Bush.