A/N: This is the prologue to what will end up being a very long and involved piece of work centered on Mrs. Lovett from the musical Sweeney Todd. I have played Mrs. Lovett in the show and now want to chronicle her based on the character analysis I wrote, and for personal amusement. I love Mrs. Lovett. We're practically the same person.

I have taken some liberties with location here, there's not (to my knowledge anyway) really a graveyard so close to the Thames.

These versions of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett and all other characters belong to Christopher Bond/Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler. Yes. Enjoy!

By the Sea

PROLOGUE:

A great author once described the river as a chronicler of the ages. The Tigris and the Euphrates, in their great fertile womb of a valley, have seen the first formations of beast and man. The great Nile has watched the rise and fall of more than one great empire, the atrocities of war. The Huang He has, in all her destructive watery rage, washed away village after village, century after century. The Amazon has witnessed the tribal life, its great, sinewy body cut through by knifelike canoes; the Mississippi, whose banks should by all means be red with the blood of civil unrest, has been a hand to guide the enslaved to his freedom. Today, these eternal serpents observe a very different world, but in the silt dragged along their bellies, they keep the past alive.

Such is true of the river Thames. Cutting through London like a bolt of lightning, this ancient, gray-brown streak has silently endured since before Man came to England. Its murky waters have been sailed on by the Vikings most likely, by the Romans definitely, by the Anglo-Saxons. Prisoners of war and treason let the river carry them solemnly to their fate at the Tower of London. It witnessed the rise of the theatre, the big "wooden O" of Shakespeare's command constructed at its side. Merchants, warriors, and fishermen alike have ridden its frothy flow. And at its bottom, more than likely rest the bones of thousands dead, their remains trapped in the silt of time.

This gargantuan guardian of death is secretive, indeed, for even its visible banks contain mysteries. Cleopatra's Needle, the gates into the Tower, centuries of architecture… and, dozens of meters away, a city of the dead. This plethora of unmarked graves bears an ominous air, for in a Christian nation it would be odd indeed to bury the dead without recognition, unless the bodies were damned anyway.

Yes, these mossy stones mark the final resting places of London's worst – thieves and killers, rapists and the insane.

Most, if not all, of these crude 19th-century burial places are in fact empty, the bodies having been stolen in the night for use in medical dissections, and never returned. The only way one could certainly avoid being the subject of anatomical study was to have no body to work with; to have been cremated.

Because of this, only one occupant remains undisturbed. Her ashes were buried along with the body of a man; his corpse was taken, of course, but having no use for cremated remains, the grave-robbers let her lie, and so she lies in a million particles, to this day.

Who is this scattering of woman, with the unmarked grave and companion in death taken so many years ago? How did she come to this place, a place for twisted criminals and dregs of Victorian society? DNA testing cannot verify her identity, nor was it ever officially recorded who was buried there.

Yet, though the grave is without name, all of London knows her, and the man once with her. They cannot always remember their names, but they all know it in the very depths of their unconscious minds. The nearby Fleet Street remembers too, with a kind of unspoken fear – for, though it is now part of the peaceful printing district, it once witnessed a horror most unspeakable.

And the perpetrators of this horrific act? None other than the buried couple. But since the man is long gone, one must to the unnamable woman, and through her, live a tale of lies, love, and murder most foul. For like the river, the dead, too, can tell stories.