10. Hush
In her time upon the earth, Nellie has always been the one to comfort others. Sometimes she thinks it was all she was born to do.
As a youngster, she had been forced to listen to her mother and father's explosive arguments, which had always ended with her father slamming the door on the way to the alehouse and her mother a sobbing wreck curled up on the kitchen floor. Nellie had been the one to dry her mother's tears and tend to the bruises. She had never cried with her, even though it had broken her heart to see her parents fight and her mother left in such a state. Instead, she'd always taken the reins, made everything better.
She'd been the one to comfort her husband once the two of them had discovered that she couldn't bear children. She'd hidden her own despair deep inside, her silent tears staining the pillow in the dead of night.
After Benjamin Barker had been deported, Nellie had swallowed her own anguish at the loss of her dear barber, taking care of a distraught Lucy until the yellow haired woman had given in and taken the arsenic.
Fifteen years later, she's doing the same for Sweeney Todd.
She tries to soothe him as best she can when the memories of Lucy become too much for him to handle. She's as close to him now as he'll ever allow.
On the nights when Toby awakens, crying and hysterical from some nightmare of Pirelli or the workhouse, she is the one by his bedside, rocking him gently until his fears have been quelled and he can sleep peacefully in her arms.
There is no one to comfort Nellie. No one to hush and soothe her when the exhausting work and the uphill struggle with her feelings for a man who doesn't even notice her take their toll. She never lets the boy see her weak. He depends on her strength, and she doesn't want to trouble him. He worries enough as it is. Turning to Sweeney Todd for comfort is not even worth contemplating. The barber doesn't remember feelings other than anger and hatred.
She has everything she's ever wanted—a boy to call her own and Sweeney Todd back in his rightful place, living above her—but sometimes Nellie Lovett has never felt so alone.