Nicknames: Often goes by Essie; sometimes introduces herself under other first or last names when she chooses.
Birthdate: 14th February, 1852
Current Age: 37 Years
Occupation: Model & Moocher
Reputation: 2? 1?
How low can you go? A middle class married woman who ran away with a pornographer, has featured heavily in pornography herself, and has since co-habited with a number of men who are not her husband. She knows, she knows - she’s practically irredeemable.Residence: London
Hogwarts House: Slytherin
Wand: Holly and dragon heartstring, 9”, swishy.
Blood Status: Halfblood
Social Class: Working. (Once middle, she has fallen as far as one can go.)
Family:
A mother, father, and three sisters who no doubt would now pretend they don’t see her on the street.
James Montgomery | Husband, technically | 1852
Thomas Montgomery | Son | 1874
Temperance Montgomery | Daughter | 1878-1878
Appearance: In spite of dark hair that falls in waves and eyes of a sharp blue, Ester leans towards striking rather than beautiful, with her unusually-shaped mouth, strong nose and arched eyebrows. That said, she has good skin and a shapely figure - the latter of which many can attest to, given how often she has been photographed nude. When dressed, she chooses things to best accentuate her natural assets... and she does have a taste for fine materials, as long as someone else is buying. She is right-handed in both writing and wandwork, and tall for a woman at 5’5”.
History:
1852 | Her mother was the muggleborn daughter of a country curate, her father a halfblood wizard from a sprawling family. They had two daughters before Ester, and another after, and lived in an unassuming village somewhere in Shropshire. Essie is a noisy, fussy baby, but grows up to be lively and quick.
1857 | The girls attend the village school. Ester is not the most precocious there - and most are less easily distracted, and less likely to get in trouble - but these years have little effect on her. Her memories and highlights of these days are instead of fighting over ribbons with her sisters, wading through the nearby stream in her socks, catching frogs and playing tag. She is young and never bored.
1863 | She follows her elder sisters to Hogwarts. They are Hufflepuffs both, but the Hat places her in Slytherin, where she (a mediocre middle class halfblood) rubs shoulders with girls of different blood and rank, but above all with other students with ambition. It sparks something in her, this: some sort of dissatisfaction that she only learns to understand years later, and too late.
1865 | She is bad at her classes because she cares so little about them, but she is deaf to her parents’ nagging letters or her teachers’ chastisements, too playful by half. After all, what is it they say about all work and no play making Jack a dull boy?
1866 | Never mind Jack, though, it’s a James that she meets. They become fast friends - almost too fast - and they get along splendidly. He is thoughtful and does all manner of nice things for her, leaves her little gifts and notes and drawings in her schoolbooks; she gives him his first kiss.
1868 | She finishes her fifth year in May with a few OWLs out of the lot, but she has known she is to follow in her sisters’ footsteps and turn her head to a good marriage now, anyway, so the cluster of OWLs don’t matter much. What does create a kink in the plan, however, is that James has asked her to marry him, and she has secretly promised herself to him. In two years, when he has finished his NEWTs, they will be married.
1869 | Ester keeps this secret from even her sisters, delighted by the way it burns inside her and content to pass her days attending garden parties and shopping trips without making any efforts to achieve anything, only striking up conversations with eligible gentlemen to pass the time. It’s not her fault if it’s an enjoyable activity.
1870 | Nothing is to come of it, anyway, because James Montgomery graduates with his excellent NEWTs and they make their engagement official in a matter of months. If either of their families are disappointed with the match, it breezes right past Essie, who is perfectly happy. (And perhaps a little pleased to subvert expectations.)
1871 | And so they marry, once James has gotten a job, embarked on a career to support her and the family they are to have. They have a pretty cottage in a Yorkshire village, near James’ muggle parents, who seem perfectly agreeable to having their daughter-in-law a witch. She tries her best to make sure she is liked by everyone, and does her best to be a faultless wife and homemaker... though she isn’t sure whether she is truly suited for it or simply committed to pretending.
1873 | Gleefully, she tells James she is pregnant, and this gives him renewed cause to dote on her, which she cannot complain about.
1874 | On the seventh April, a son! They call him Thomas James, and her sisters and her parents and James’ family all coo over the picture-perfect life she leads. Ester is terrified of this newfound responsibility, though she tries not to show it. She gets more comfortable the older baby Thomas gets, at least, and begins to believe this will all work out as it should.
1877 | Just as the routine is beginning to itch at her, she gets pregnant again and has all the fuss of that to distract her. She feels certain it will be a girl this time -
1878 | And she is right. Temperance, her baby girl is named, only this time the birth was harder for her and she is put on laudanum for the recovery. What is worse is that there is something not quite right with the baby, and before the year is out, little Temperance is dead.
1879 | And now she can’t bear James’ thoughtfulness and his doting on her is suffocating, and sometimes she can barely look her son in the eye, either. The grief hits her in different ways: fits of sobbing, empty dazes, days when she can do nothing but lie in bed and wish she was the one who was dead.
They pick up and move to Hogsmeade - James’ idea - in the hope, she presumes, that it will lift her spirits and provoke some life into her. It does, eventually, though not in the way her husband has hoped. She likes Hogsmeade better than the little Yorkshire village: it is busier, and there are places to explore, and new people to meet. She meets Charles Seddon there, in fact, and he is just what she has needed as a distraction. He is sharp where James is too soft, and passionate, and interesting and has aspirations. He sees her, restores some of her vigour, waxes on about her beauty, tells her she is wasted on motherhood anyway. She is just what he has been waiting for, he says! She should model for him. He’s a photographer (read: pornographer and general sleaze), and she has just the right spark. Ester is not so naive that she doesn’t immediately know what she is dipping her toe into, what people would say if they knew, but there is something fun in dressing up and undressing and playing fanciful games with him, something in the danger of it, that makes it all a lark. Good. She needs something that isn’t sombre and serious, something like this, to survive.
And if she has continued to take laudanum for her spirits, who can blame her? There has been much to adjust to. It lessens the pain, and makes her moods better for a time.
1882 | Seddon has not been able to publish any photographs of her - she has forbidden that thus far - but they have tumbled into a more personal affair, and she relies on it for her pleasure. It helps, of course, that he has a friend who is quite the amateur chemist, and knows how to mix stronger tinctures of opium when the laudanum drops she has are not nearly enough. She tries other things, too. Whatever’s going.
Besides, it’s not as though James isn’t doing stupid things for the hell of it; he’s been drafted into that expedition, and once Irvingly has been founded, decides to drag them all there. Perhaps he hopes another move will knit the family back together.
1885 | It does not. Irvingly is wearisome and Ester is bored here, though she tries to make things work. She even tries going off the laudanum and sinks into another depression over Temperance again. She pretends happiness well enough for Thomas’ sake, poor boy, but once he leaves home and goes off to Hogwarts the truth about her life and marriage is exposed in stark relief. Why was she fool enough to marry James? She had been too young; had not realised all the lives she might have had instead, ones without pain and grief and boredom.
Might as well blow up her life, then. A week or so before Thomas is set to come home for the holidays, Essie puts her escape plan into motion. Seddon is more than happy to put her up and carry on with her without any competition, and there is a boost to his business when she lets him sell his photographs featuring her. There comes another boost - or a knock to her dignity, if only she cared - when the scandal breaks about what has happened to Mr. Montgomery’s wife. Run off with some sleaze from the slums, with no care for her son.
1886 | She does care about Thomas, of course. But he is better off without her. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother. She is better at the modelling, at the lounging about with all his artistic friends and in a bohemian, free-loving lifestyle, where all the money earnt by Charles’ photography (and the back-room pornography business) and that of his druggist friends is pooled together to buy drink and smokes and a grand dissolute trip to Paris.
1887 | Charles’ undercover business gets busted by the constables and he gets sent packing for a sentence, and disappears from the scene, leaving Essie flat. She flees to London and reaches some new laudanum-fuelled lows where she can scarcely remember what she has been doing, and her moods begin to swing more erratically between euphoria and despair. It is around this time that, suddenly understanding abandonment, she begins to question her life choices, and remembers that she has a son she left behind. She very nearly goes back and pleads with James, but how would he forgive her? Instead, she starts sending letters to Thomas, sure that her son will be more forgiving.
1889 | Thomas has not yet proven that he has read a single one of her letters, thus far refusing to reach out to her, but Essie continues to write them nonetheless. (Perhaps one can’t blame him, for they are vastly varied in tone: some solemn and penitent, some imploring, some cheerful, some brash and raging, some nearly illegibly scrawled out during a high.) But in the meantime, Essie has found some joie de vivre again in London. The city is where she was always meant to be, and she has fallen in with a new crowd of artistes, degenerates and libertines, and spends her days in bars and theatres and the back rooms of erotic bookshops and draughty painting studios, and in relationships with a string of men not altogether unlike Charles Seddon. Though some have been better looking.
There is not much security in this life, but she still enjoys it, most of the time. She is sure she will climb back into her son’s good graces sooner or later, and is determined to keep trying until he can’t ignore her any longer. In the meantime, she fancies perhaps turning her hand to acting. She’ll see what comes her way.
Personality: Even before the laudanum addiction, Ester had erratic moods and an itch of restlessness. The highs and lows of feeling were not so pronounced as nowadays, and back when she was a girl and a wife she did her very best to temper them, but now she wouldn’t see the point in hiding them even if she were in control. She is guided by flight and fancy, and has an impetuous streak that doesn’t pair so well with her self-serving, Slytherin sense of cunning and ambition; rather, it tends to lead to bad decisions. She has always been a bit of a tease and a flirt and a pleasure-seeker, but is easily seduced herself by art of any kind, anything that adds meaning to life that is not merely “expectation” and “duty”. She has a sort of courage, in that she doesn’t show shame even when pressured to by society, and will seek out the happiness she needs to survive no matter how ruthless she may need to be in pursuit of it. She is mostly attracted to men but is casually bisexual, but is not suited to stringent commitment. However shameless she seems, she does often genuinely miss the companionship of her parents or sisters or her husband and son - though, all in all, she can’t be entirely sorry she left.
Sample Roleplay Post:
![[Image: tumblr_o0rxogb5vz1qa9qc7o1_400.gif]](https://66.media.tumblr.com/775b545bf4edbcba34d7144cb0ccc75e/tumblr_o0rxogb5vz1qa9qc7o1_400.gif)
Age: I did it again
![[Image: uWJZ5yA.png]](https://i.imgur.com/uWJZ5yA.png)
![[Image: TrSGeWR.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/TrSGeWR.jpg)