1878 | Maia Fletcher, a young Irishwoman whose remaining family had emigrated to Wales, is working on a farm in the Welsh countryside. She is pretty, poetic and simple, and only seventeen when she stumbles into the path of a wealthy gentleman. She doesn’t think to ask if he’s already married – he seems to be head over heels for her. Obviously, it doesn’t last, and it is only when she searches for him, heavily pregnant, that she realises who he actually is: the patriarch of a pureblood family, high in wizarding society. She doesn’t stand a chance.
He pays her off well enough for her troubles, small consolation that that is, but on the condition that she leaves behind her family and takes the child out of the country. Not out of the countryside, but out of the country. Without the faintest idea where to go, Maia packs up and flees to Tuscany – chosen in a flight of something like fancy – and goes into labour, inconveniently, on a wagon ride as they travel to a town: her son, born bright-eyed and healthy, is named James.
1879 | Much as she has had romantic notions of Italy, work-wise it is hardly in a more prosperous position than Ireland was in her parents’ day, so she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Maia certainly likes Italian music, dances and the warm Mediterranean air, but hasn’t a great deal of skills to offer, being uneducated in most magic. She heads into the nearest town in northern Italy. Factory work proves too demanding with a young child she yearns to take better care of – especially a child prone to crawling off like James – so instead she learns the ropes of seamstressing in an Italian robe shop.
1883 | When James is still young, Maia meets an Italian wizard in town. They strike up an affair – he is unmarried at least, this time – and he seems to like her as much as she likes him. The only problem, the one small hitch to their happiness? He’s on the run from the law. An art thief and conman, Alessandro Fontana never stays in one place long.
1884 | So Maia picks up and follows him across Italy region after region, subsisting on the money he makes (cheats) out of performing as a magician, because obviously magic tricks work better on muggles, even for the laziest sort of man. Now that they’re together, Alessandro is not quite as sweet to some-other-man’s foreign kid, and treats James (Alessandro refuses to use an English name, and re-christens him “Geronimo”) with a kind of casual cruelty – occasionally physical, but more often with jests and taunts that do not sit well with James or his mother. Whatever her young son thinks of the man, Maia isn’t much at liberty to say so, as she soon gives birth to another boy, Lorenzo.
1886 | Reluctant to repeat a situation all over again as a single mother but more sensible than she once was, Maia abandons Alessandro and their precarious lifestyle before he can abandon her. She plans to take both her boys with her, but Alessandro catches up to her and confronts her: so help him, he won’t let her leave with his son. He snatches Lorenzo and has disappeared before she can beg him to reconsider. Delirious with heartbreak, Maia gives up and decides to head back to Britain with James – she is sure the boy’s birth father won’t bother looking for her or his son after all these years. (She’ll be surprised if he remembers her.) So Maia finds a place to board in Hogsmeade and sets out to be a seamstress again... but she has brought something else with her from Italy, and it’s cholera. In a month, she dies.
His mother might be the only person in the world he cares about, but James is not left entirely alone, and is – reluctantly – taken under the wing of the lone relative of Maia’s that had settled nearby in Hogsmeade (and not overtly thought her a stain on the family). Maia’s grandmother is old, boring, doddery and possibly not-all-there, but that suits James excellently. This leaves him free to roam the world... well, roam the village... and get into unsupervised mischief with the kids in Hogsmeade and generally be the bane of everyone’s existence.
1887 | James doesn’t know how Great Granny Fletcher lives on her soup and her knitting in her house – nice enough, for the worst areas of Hogsmeade – old and lonely as she is, but he does notice money coming in from somewhere, because he’s not a total idiot. (What he doesn’t know is where it comes from, exactly: she tells him some jumbled-up mishmash about some distant relative or family friend (godfather?) who wants to take care of them.) Honestly, James is nine. He doesn’t give a rat’s arse.
1888 | James has got his own stash of cash to live on, anyway. As he tells his Great-Granny, he’s got a job as a delivery boy, a messenger running notes and packages for people for a couple knuts when they don’t have an owl handy, or handing out papers and leaflets on the street. He’s got a good memory for relaying things verbally, as well, James does. His knowledge of addresses also helps him in his other job – which is all top-secret, obviously – running scouting missions, errands and loitering in doorways for Hestia, the canny con-artist who works at the Hog’s Head and who is much nicer to him than Alessandro ever was. And she’s waaaaaay prettier, too.
He’s quite happy tearing away day after day around the streets of Hogsmeade, passing messages and learning things, and he’s no stranger to a bit of rough-and-tumble, either. Rich-relative-man might even pay his way through Hogwarts in September, apparently, if Great-Granny keeps scamming the fellow or whatever she’s doing to get that money off him. In the meantime, he’s got plenty of friends and enemies (and a weird friend-slash-enemy in one Billie Farrow – and his damned cat, too) and James considers himself more than a match for them all, thank you very much.
1890 | Just before they set off for Hogwarts, Jimmy is confronted by the news that Billie Farrow is – a – a – a girl. This is terrible news, because now he feels bad for giving her a nosebleed one time.
But they go to Hogwarts, all the same. Jimmy is sorted into Gryffindor, and quickly establishes himself as the most obnoxious child in his year, no stranger to detentions or causing chaos in class.
1891 | In second year, he makes it onto the quidditch team as Keeper, so maybe he’ll earn some house points back for once.
1892 | In third year he adds COMC and Ghoul Studies.
1893 | No matter how he does at school, the money to fund his way through Hogwarts just keeps coming. Interesting.
