In the fall of 1955, a great scandal held the attention of Britain's Wizarding High Society. A daughter of one of the great Pureblood families, one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight no less, had run off with a muggle. Lord and Lady Selwyn had done their best to contain the rumors, but there was little they could do to stop the spread of gossip. After all, it was not every day that one of the most eligible young ladies in society, who had only just months before announced her engagement to the Rosier heir, threw away her entire future like that. That the girl was pregnant was immediately taken as a given by all the gossips, and while the exact identity of the father was unknown, it became quickly clear from the shock and anger of the Rosier family that their son had not been involved. The news that Miss Cordelia Selwyn's lover was in fact a muggle could not be suppressed for long, and soon all of Society believed they knew all the juicy details of the scandal.
What they were unaware of, though, at least at the start, was just how much more dramatic the tale was about to become. For the muggle boy in question had been entirely unaware of his lover's magic, or of her condition. For the entire length of their rather short and passionate affair, she had told him only that the relationship had to be kept a secret because her parents would be angry if they knew. Being unaware that magic existed, he had quite reasonably assumed that they were simply the usual sort of aristocratic snobs, or didn't think their daughter was old enough to have a beau, let alone a common one. Rather optimistically, he had assumed that everything would somehow work out alright in the end, believing (as indeed had Miss Selwyn) that nothing could stand between the star crossed lovers that they believed themselves to be.
When Miss Selwyn appeared suddenly to see her young Tommy, still in tears from her parents' cruel and angry words when they discovered her pregnancy, he was taken aback to hear that she was pregnant and expected him to marry her immediately. Given a little time and a chance to digest the news, he likely would have come around and done exactly that, for he was both a decent lad and a romantic at heart, but unfortunately for her, Miss Selwyn never seemed to know when to stop talking. Still reeling from the events of the previous hours - her mother finding out that she was pregnant (and perhaps more importantly to Lady Selwyn, that the father of the child was not her betrothed), her declaring that she wasn't going to marry the young Master Rosier at all, her parents throwing her out of the house and declaring they never wanted to see her again - it had begun to dawn on Miss Selwyn just how dangerous keeping secrets could be, and how terrible the consequences when those secrets were revealed. Instead of this making her properly cautious about suddenly revealing information to people, the young lady had somehow come to the conclusion that the best thing to do in that moment was to spill all of her secrets to her young man immediately. Perhaps she hoped that they could simply put it all behind them and go back to how things had been (or how they had imagined they might be in the future) if she only told him quickly enough, relying on the strength of their love for each other to get them through it.
But life is not the fairytale that young children might hope for or expect, and in this case true love (or whatever semblance of it might have been present in the young couple) was not enough to save the day. When his girlfriend began to babble about witches and magic and a whole other world lurking around the edges of the one he knew, it proved to be too much for young Tommy. Miss Selwyn was not the only one who could have used a little more time to process everything. Between finding out that his sweetheart was pregnant, finding out that she had been engaged to another man for the entire duration of their relationship, finding out that she was a witch, and attempting to handle not only the implications of each of those facts but also of how much she had been lying to him the entire time, the young man no longer had any interest in having anything to do with her.
With a little more time to reflect perhaps he would have acted differently, but he was young and hurt and confused. He lashed out at the one he blamed for turning his world upside down, shouting at her no less cruelly than her parents had, then stalked off, not even bothering to look back as he walked out of her life entirely. Perhaps he later came to regret his actions, or perhaps quickly forgot his summer fling with the strange aristocratic girl and moved on with someone new, or perhaps some combination of the two, but as far as Miss Selwyn was concerned, Tommy's story was no longer any part of hers.
But her story did continue, albeit still showing signs of being a rather dramatic tragedy rather than the fairy tale that she had always assumed it would be. Disowned by her parents, rejected by her lover, virtually penniless and carrying a bastard half-muggle child, the future seemed rather grim for the young Miss Selwyn. Unwilling to beg her parents for help or forgiveness, and aware that rumors must already have eliminated any hope of help from her friends in Society, she turned to another source for aid. Old rumors claimed that Lady Selwyn née Silther had once had another elder brother, who was now only spoken about in scandalized whispers. Jack Silther had run off years before the young Miss Selwyn was even born, and was rumored to live somewhere in the rundown maze of streets that made up the so-called "Lower Alleys'' beyond Diagon.
The stories were unclear on the exact reason for his estrangement from the family, but most suggested it had been for the sake of an unsuitable lover, so the girl hoped he might have sympathy for her plight. The young woman made her way towards the heart of the Lower Alleys, with its narrow streets and buildings so old and rickety that they seemed held up by magic alone, for the laws of nature would surely have seen them toppling over. She passed the scattered shops, many selling goods that could not be bought at the more reputable stores of Diagon Alley itself, searching for the man she hoped would give her refuge. In a rare stroke of luck, she found an old witch who reluctantly admitted that Old Jack, as she called him, could usually be found at the workshop of the Old Master of the Alleys, the greatest wizard above or below Diagon (or so she claimed).
Miss Selwyn's newly returned luck held out a little longer, and she found her uncle where the old woman had indicated. He was a strange old man, seeming to not quite recall how to go about holding a proper conversation with a young lady, but it was clear even behind the awkwardness and rusty social skills that he wanted to help. He listened as her words rushed out, spilling over themselves as she tried to explain her sudden change in circumstances, and awkwardly patted her on the back and offered her a handkerchief when her emotions overwhelmed her and she began sobbing into her hands. Though a seemingly unlikely pair, the old man and his pretty niece soon became a common sight in their little corner of the Alleys, and the young lady learned her way around the neighborhood, though she never entirely got used to the place, so different from the grand manors and fine estates that she had grown up with.
She gave birth to her daughter there, assisted by one of the old women who served as midwives and healers to those who wished to avoid the bureaucracy and oversight of St. Mungo's. In one of her (unfortunately many) moments of romantic fancy, the new mother named her child Selena, for the brilliant full moon she had glimpsed outside the window during her labor. Despite her estrangement, she gave the child the Selwyn family name, out of some combination of nostalgia for her old life, hope that it might give the child a better chance in her future, and lack of any other ideas for what to call her. Nearly a year of turmoil and heartbreak had passed since Cordelia Selwyn's dramatic break with everything she had ever known, but the beginning of Selena Selwyn's story would not prove to be an end to her mother's struggles and woes, but instead only the start of her own.
Author's Note: Thank you for reading! The draft of this story is completely written, so I should be able to update fairly consistently (current plan is ~2 times a week). This will be one of my angstier stories, but I am also in the process of writing a longer, happier one exploring a world in which Severus Snape and Lily Evans are sorted into Hufflepuff, which I hope to be able to start posting some time this summer (real life schedule permitting).
As always, comments and favs are greatly appreciated!