Eileen Prince was not raised to marry a muggle. She was raised on the quasi-religious belief system based around the ideals of blood purity that is a fixture of childhood in every pure blood home. Growing up, her parents had been mysterious figures to whom she owed respect, but only saw once weekly for supper and, if she behaved herself, on holidays or occasions when guests asked after her. The day-to-day duties of grooming, teaching and comforting fell to the combination governess-nanny whom her parents employed.
What money they had, and there was enough of it for a decant standard of living, if not the lavish displays of wealth favoured by some of the prominent pureblood families, had fallen to Eileen's father after the death of his own father some years before. The manor home that they inhabited was nestled among beds of rock in the chilly north of Britain and had also been a part of Eileen's father's inheritance, as the eldest son of the previous generation of Princes. The family employed a gardener, a cook, a housekeeper and the governess/nanny. Most put upon was the house keeper, who had seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a parlour, a dinning room, a study, two sitting rooms and a foyer to look after. The gardener had little to do because the climate and rocky ground were not conducive to plant growth.
Neither wife nor husband engaged in casual pleasantries with their neighbours, though, that did not offend anyone, as the nearest were easily a kilometre and a half away, and, as muggles, rather frightened by the Prince family. Distant relatives, often Blacks, Malfoys, or Peverells, would visit on occasion, but that manor house was a lonely place to grow up.
Eileen would be woken, bathed and dressed in time to eat breakfast at seven o'clock every morning from the age of two. Lessons would follow, focusing on such menial tasks as memorizing the family tree, how to identify those of unclean blood and embroidery. If she behaved and finished all of the assignments given to her by her governess, she would be allowed to play in the time between dinner and supper. Her favourite pass-time during these hours was to takes the polished metal balls used to make the joints on her dolls rotate and try to bump them into each other. The nanny, who was not entirely unaware of the preferences and skills of her ward, began to teach her a game that she had played as a teenager. They would go outside, where nobody would notice, let alone penalize them, for drawing concentric circles around one of the many holes in the rocky surface of the courtyard. They would play gobbstones together, and Eileen knew that no matter how vehemently the governess denied it, she enjoyed their afternoons of playing.
By the time she was eleven, Eileen had surpassed the governess' talent and had even received her very own set of gobbstones, though she never believed that they were from some fat old man in a red suit who had snuck down the chimney. Her governess was a half-blood, not worthy of a higher position in the house so far as Mrs. And Mr. Prince were concerned, and she had some odd stories that Eileen knew better than to repeat to her parents. She also knew that the gobbstones had been a final gift from the governess before Eileen went to school.
On September 1st the governess brought Eileen to platform 9¾, whispering her final goodbyes once the train was already moving away and there was nobody around who bothered to listen. When Eileen got accepted as a member of the Hogwarts gobbstones team, she wrote to her governess at the address of her parents' house, but received no reply. It was not until the Christmas holiday, when she returned home, that the housekeeper informed her that the governess had left, her contract expired now that Eileen was 'old enough to look after herself'.
The loss of her earliest friend saddened Eileen, but in the social situations presented at school she found other people with like interests. Her favourite was a half-blood boy from Hufflepuff, who also played on the gobbstones team. He had soft brown hair and pale eyes and they grew close over their years at Hogwarts. In the fifth year, on February fourteenth, he and Eileen went to Madame Puddifoots together. It had been his idea and she had been thrilled, elated that he noticed her in that way. Over hot chocolate and little heart shaped biscuits, their relationship changed. They stopped being outcasts thrown together by necessity and became a couple, kept together by love. They kissed and giggled and did homework together and played gobstones, co-captaining the team in sixth year.
When Valentines Day came again, in their seventh year, he stopped sipping the warm cocoa and got down on one knee in front of her, a simple diamond ring balanced on his palm. He asked her one simple question and she gave him one simple answer and they were, for the first time in either of their lives, entirely happy. They began to make wedding plans, and on a few occasions they practiced for their wedding night. When they both graduated they arranged to spend the first week of summer at Eileen's parents' house, so that they could meet her fiancée, about whom they knew very little.
He was not rich, pureblooded or headed for a job in politics. None of this bothered Eileen in the slightest, but her parents took a very different view of the man she loved when at last they met. Dirty blood they whispered to each other over supper on the first night of his stay. And that night, when he came to her room as he had promised he would, he had been vacant; lost to the imperious curse and under the command of her father, but Eileen was not experienced enough with dark magic to recognize the symptoms. All she saw and heard was the man she loved breaking off their engagement.
Eileen ran to the housekeeper, begging for an explanation. Being very observant and generally ignored by Mr. And Mrs. Prince, she was able to explain what had happened. But when Eileen went to find him, searched all over the house, she discovered that he had left, still under the influence of the dark magic, so he would not return.
Furious and heart broken, she did not bother to have any final words with her parents, opting to simply leave immediately. She found herself in a dingy muggle town, as far away from everything her parents had ever been as she could get. On her third day in the dull place called Spinner's End she met a man named Tobias, the farthest thing from her parent's ideal son-in-law she was ever going to find. They were married before the week was out and the wedding photo was the last correspondence she ever had with the family she could only assume had disowned her. What her husband was too drunk to notice was that the ring she wore was not the one that he had placed on her finger while a muggle priest droned on, but the one that she had received in Madame Puddifoots.
A muggle doctor had informed Eileen that she was pregnant after she had become nauseous and achy, her period having stopped. She had been entirely unable to self diagnose because she had never learnt such things, her parents having deemed such information 'corrupting'.
The news pleased her, but Tobias just seemed irritated that there would be another mouth to feed. He went to the pub and came home completely incoherent. But he did not lay a hand on her, didn't hit her once during the pregnancy. Odd, she thought some years later, considering his willingness to hit Severus once he was born. Perhaps he did have a sense of ethics, even if it was twisted almost beyond recognition. Whatever Tobias' reasoning, Eileen was grateful for the reprieve, already feeling indebted to her unborn son.
A few days after Eileen and Tobias' nine-month wedding anniversary, on the ninth of January 1960, Eileen was taken to a muggle hospital to give birth to her son. Though there were doctors and painkillers she wished very strongly that Tobias would have let her go to St. Mongo's for the birth.
He knew about magic, had since the beginning, when he caught Eileen using it to clean the kitchen and she had explained everything about her powers. Like everything else, he didn't like it and forbid its use. "You live under my roof now and I want a proper wife. You will keep this house clean and you will cook, you'll be like the women in the magazines, and that means no magic!" he had yelled on the sixth day of their marriage. Then he had come very close to her, the stink of alcohol heavy on his breath as he pushed her chin up so that she had to look him in they eyes, not that he was having very much luck focussing them, while he said with mock gentility "do you understand that, or is your skull too thick?" Eileen had made no reply but he seemed to take it as a yes and left her to finish scrubbing the linoleum floor. By the time she had finished, her knees were bruised to match the various places Tobias' fists had already begun to find.
As she screamed and griped the sheets because Tobias wouldn't come close enough for her to hold his hand, Eileen wondered how the birth of a child might have been different if she was married to the man she loved. She wasn't sure, but she thought she might remember all the pain of labour with just a touch of something good to it under those circumstances. Of course, she found the baby itself a happy thing, but pain like this didn't seem quite worth it, when it only pushed the one person she loved and had in her life out and farther away from her.
After too many hours for her to want to count them, a tinny baby was placed in her arms. His skin was sallow, this nose disproportionately large and his head already covered by black hair. The sigh of relief that Eileen breathed was not for the end of the pain, she would suffer almost anything for her child, what she was so comforted by was the fact that the boy looked so very much like her. Is it selfish, she wondered, to be glad that your son will never be attractive if it means you don't have to suffer frequent reminders about who his father is? She knew the answer, but the idea that she might still have a part of the boy who's ring she wore was far more appealing than that of being entirely selfless.