| Hogwarts | Hogwarts offers Emrys a whole new world of opportunities, which he takes great pains to explore fully. During his first year or two he is frequently lost in the castle, but by third year has a better command of the secret rooms at Hogwarts than any of his classmates, and has learned a great deal from talking to the portraits. He adds two classes in third year but drops both of them in favor of others after the first two weeks of class. He never properly catches up from having missed the first few weeks, but it doesn't seem to bother him much.
He tries out for and makes the house Quidditch team as a fifth year, but is not much devoted to it and drops off the following year. The same happens with several clubs that he joins and then tires of. Overall, at Hogwarts, he is happy but bored. He is quite popular and makes many friends, though, and often goes to visit them over holidays.
His father, having noted to some degree his restlessness at school, begins to ask what he would like to do beginning sixth year. Emrys has no particular ideas, though he does know that as the second son he really ought to do something. The issue of what is still unresolved by the time of his graduation. |
| Young Adult | Believing that he may benefit from some travel and possibly some time to "find himself," Emrys' father invents some sort of managerial task that needs doing in the shipping company he owns and sends Emrys out to sea. He spends the next two years bouncing between offices in India and China, and while he isn't sure he's found "his true calling," if such a thing exists, the multicultural aspect of his work is at least passably interesting. He realizes retrospectively that being shipped off this way was probably an effort on behalf of his parents to prevent him from following in his older brother's footsteps — at least if he goes sowing wild oats abroad, the resulting progeny are significantly less visible than the ones born in England. He doesn't mind, though. When he has concluded his initial "job" he switches to one in America, where he stays for about a year.
He returns to England for his older brother's wedding in 1874, which seems rather rushed. The household isn't an entirely pleasant place in the aftermath (and is more crowded than he remembered it from years ago), so he starts looking for an opportunity to go somewhere else. An opportunity to acquire a nice house in Bristol arises and he takes it, occupying himself for several months thereafter with plans for renovations and refurbishing; the resulting house is something he is quite happy with.
Emrys now finds himself with a small pile of money (acquired from his pay for the four years abroad, since his living expenses during that time were covered by his father's company as a business cost) and no particular ideas what to do next. He starts half-heartedly working on a book and throws some nice parties at his new estate. He becomes an investor, which seems to pay off fairly well, and he considers possibly just doing this (which is to say, not much of anything) for the rest of his life. It's not a bad gig, being rich.
He is quite convinced that his mother's death in 1880 is a murder, though he has no proof of this, nor any clear ideas about who might have killed her or for what purpose. His growing understanding of the dynamics of his older brother's family, however, just leads him to believe that house is the sort of place one might be murdered in, so it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude this has been his mother's fate. He makes a point of visiting less frequently. |
| After That | The passing of his father sees Emrys quite unexpectedly in possession of the shipping company that he had briefly worked for. This is a delightful opportunity to go abroad on a tour of all of the company offices and ports of harbor, which takes him out of England for the dreadful mourning period. He returns over a year later and goes back to throwing parties and generally enjoying life, and makes business decisions when it's required of him. The company does well, as do his investments.
His younger brother gets married in 1885, and the developments that follow just further convince Emrys that marriage is a terrible idea. Some people just aren't cut out for married life (the older branch of Selwyns), and for everyone else, there's in-laws.
He continues living it up and traveling whenever the mood strikes him for several years. He invests in a few things here and there, some of which go well and some of which do not, but his income is generally not terribly affected, and with a small household (one man and several servants), his expenses are not significant. In recent years, however, a rival shipping company based in America has had an increasingly strong presence in Britain, which affects his profits and therefore his lifestyle, to an extent. How obnoxious.
News that a member of the Delaney family has gone to America following a wedding early in 1890 gives him hope that perhaps they will go away, but that seems not to be the case. Seeing that ignoring them has not helped matters much, Emrys decides to try a charm offensive: the Delaneys have at least one unmarried daughter, and he supposes if he does marry, there are worse things to be gained in the bargain than his top competitor's trade secrets.
Unfortunately, before he can resolve himself one way or another she gets herself involved with some man beneath Emrys' notice. He puts the idea of marriage away again, but is in for a rude awakening that winter when rumors begin to circulate about his potential destiny as a confirmed bachelor. He resolves to marry, if only to stave off rumors and discourage anyone from looking too closely into whom he actually takes to bed. He spends a summer devoting himself to the idea more seriously and has two near-misses - a potential engagement to Octavia Fawley, then to Clarisas Cosgrove. The first is blocked by her parents, the second when his lover — Angelica Vorona — gets wind of his intentions and proposes to him instead, more or less. Emrys is certainly not keen on the idea of being legally tied to someone he cares about, having witnessed the poor example of so many marriages around him disintegrating, but agrees when she claims to be pregnant with his child, to save her from being ruined otherwise. Before this, however, he makes a confession to her of his sexuality. Angelica, having never heard of bisexuality before, at first believes he is making a cruel joke and laughs at him, which is a traumatic moment he carries as baggage for years to come.
Their marriage begins tense but cordial. Angelica believes everything will be well when the baby arrives... except it never does. When they eventually get a healer involved he names it a "hysterical pregnancy" and says there was, in fact, never a baby, despite Angelica's body giving all signs to the contrary. Angelica is besot with grief. Emrys is — conflicted. He tries to comfort her, but is unable to really feel the loss of a baby he never wanted... and privately can't help but doubt whether she really believed there was a baby in the beginning, either. His inability to stand with her in her grief drives another wedge between them and eventually Emrys, feeling suffocated, asks her to move to a separate house, though they remain publicly contently married. The separation is hard on Angelica and eventually she tries to force a reconciliation by taking a truth serum without either asking Emrys or warning him, to his absolute horror. She also tries to ask questions about his other lover — a man he had been seeing for several years at this point but had carefully kept from her, Arthur Pettigrew — and the joint betrayals of the prying and the forcing him into a conversation he wasn't ready to have drives him further away. In 1895 he tells Angelica he can see no path towards reconciliation and she is free to divorce him if she'd like, or to stay married but to give him a wide berth. |
