Dear Albert: (Oneshot) Nellie Lovett is no stranger to murder. Takes place before Sweeney Todd. R&R.
Nell Lovett sat in her dingy parlor sipping a cup of tea as she watched the fire as it began to consume the new log she had just added to the grate. The house was perfectly quiet except for the occasional hiss and pop of the slightly damp wood. There was no wheezing or coughing from down the hall, there were no bells ringing to beckon her, only silence. She sighed heavily, pulling herself out of her chair and ghosting down the hall to the bedroom she had shared with her husband.
She would call the undertaker in the morning, she thought.
The bedside table was still cluttered with empty teacups and soiled handkerchiefs, as well as a little mull of spearmint snuff. Her eyes strayed to the bed, where Albert was just as she left him. The sheets around him were mussed from his grabbing hands, some of them even spilt to the floor. But now he was still.
As if he was only asleep, she carefully smoothed the sheets around him and replaced the fallen covers. She tried moving his arms to a more peaceful position, but his body had already started to stiffen. He would have to stay the way he was, except for one thing.
Nell looked at her husband's unmoving body, not really sure whether she wanted to remove the pillow she'd pressed to his face or not.
The man had never been kind, though she tried her best. She cooked (even if she was not very good at it), cleaned, and performed her wifely duties without complaint (though, under his massive weight, it might have been difficult to do), but never earned a kind word. When gout took his leg, she waited on him. And yet, he was ever ungrateful. But she was a wife, and would do what she needed for her husband.
"Someday, Nellie. Someday you'll just as well kill me!" he said, his words punctuated with coughs.
Someday, he said. Someday came sooner than he expected. She had pressed the pillow over his face while he was sleeping. He struggled, as she excepted, but soon his body twitched and lay still. He had no strength to fight, and she felt no remorse. She felt nothing at all.
Nell lifted the pillow gently. Albert's face was contorted into a silent scream, his eyes still open and beginning to whiten.
"My dear Albert." she said, closing his eyelids with two fingers. She propped his stiff body up with the pillow that had been the instrument of his death. She straightened the bedside table and returned to the parlor, dropping herself into her chair to doze.
She would call the undertaker in the morning to come for her Dear Albert.