Credit obviously to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler.
Nell Lovett was always humming. She'd passed quite near her whole life in humming. Music had always filled her up, since she was a little child, and was never absent from her mind. Nell had a lovely voice, and when she was very little she had dreamed she'd sing for crowded, slow-lit rooms. She gave it up, though, when she was old enough to be practical, as she would be for her whole life after. She hadn't had the money to be educated where music was concerned; she hadn't been born right.
Both her parents had been bakers: her father of bread and her mother of pies. Her mother had taught her everything she knew – and had forgot and had to learn again, many times. Her parents, of course, had always meant to have a son, a strong boy to carry on their good name and trade, but they'd had no son: they'd had Nell. Nell, the only child what had lived out of a whole slew of tries, so they'd gave up after a time and focused all their enterprise upon her, the small girl who wanted nothing, really, but to go and see what tunes folk were singing on the street-corners. Nell used to burn the pies or undercook them, because she was singing. She'd loathed herself and taken to humming; it did not shatter her concentration so.
So she'd hummed absently her whole life long, and she'd sang when she was not buried in pie batter – which was less often than she would have liked. Baking, she'd supposed, ran thick in her blood, but her heart was meant for singing. She'd not had much choice but to follow the life her blood crafted for her, and to try to ignore her heart.
Oh, but she'd hummed all the time. She'd hummed at the age of sixteen, to take her mind off her father's negotiations towards her marriage – oh, mercy, she had been fond of Albert, but Nell had always been a dreamer and she'd always dreamed of love. She'd hummed at the age of eighteen, when beautiful Benjamin Barker would sit in her pie shop with his pretty wife, and Nell had smiled at them and been half-afraid her cheery hums would say more than her words ever did. At the age of twenty, she'd hummed after he was taken, while she cursed herself for never having said what she'd always meant to, and then cursed herself again for having that thought. She'd hummed at the age of four-and-twenty, to kill the silence she felt, alone with the fresh sting of Albert's death, with her pie shop and her thoughts. And she'd been humming at the age of five-and-thirty, moments before Sweeney Todd had opened her door and come dancing back into her life – older and far more shattered, but not a jot the less beautiful.