Chapter 29
Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pie Emporium
The eyes stared at him for a moment, both red-rimmed and weary as they soared into his own. Such eyes paralyzed him from movement, as they did her, for she had stopped her rhythmic cutting at a doughy substance and froze on the spot. It was like they were both entranced by the other, as if the world had ceased to spin or even exist.
"Bless me heart, a customer!" she exclaimed, stabbing the cutting board with vicious movements.
But as soon as Mrs. Lovett's eyes had widened in excitement, the spell was broken, and Sweeney bolted for the door before it could swing shut behind him.
It took nearly all of his strength to not mutter a curse, for Mrs. Lovett had advanced upon him, like predator upon prey, and clutched at the arms of his jacket. With the strength of any grown man, she hauled him over to a forsaken bench and shoved him into it. Lacking even a flick of her wrist, she had pressed him into a chair and closed the shop's front door, the clicking sound sending waves of despair throughout the man like never before.
Todd gaped at her, wide eyed, and kept his lips squashed together as the baker began to rummage around her shop for various ingredients, producing a fowl smelling meat pie along with stale liquor of which she dropped upon his table with a clatter.
Judgment, on Mr. Todd's behalf, was a learned gift. He had acquired it throughout many years of distrustful characters and lethal predicaments--predicaments that he had escaped with only the little bit of life left within him.
It did not take much prudence when it came to observing one of Mrs. Lovett's meat pies, pushing the "food" away, and never daring a single glance at it for fear of catching impending death.
As the baker continued to ramble, she confessed to the ill quality of her goods, swearing that they were, "The worst pies in all of London."
On several occasions, Sweeney raised his hand like a schoolboy, hoping to slip a word in between her frenzied rampages of which she only paused when taking a quick breath. Her attention was occupied by her work, and so a conversation would have to wait.
She did, though she thought she had not been noticed, study Mr. Todd with burning intensity. Mr. Todd acted as if he had not noticed, but he had begun to feel rather uncomfortable, if that was even possible.
After attempting to take a bite of pie, the frantic Mr. Todd could only nod in agreement and eye the floor for a spot to spit the crumbled substance.
The taste burned his mouth, somewhat of a repugnant mix between rotten meat and soggy mold. When the woman's back was turned at the counter, Sweeny spat the pie onto the floor and wiped the remnants of pie from his lips.
The vile flavor still remained.
Mrs. Lovett continued talking, moving this and confessing to that, daring him to try another pie.
And after all of her rambling, she decided it best that she resorted to pity. "Times is hard," she swore, swatting at a critter that had decided to burrow into a heap of powder. The bug was crushed beneath her rolling pin, and she stared at the gory mess in a subdued, satisfied manner.
In the mean time, Sweeney Todd was doing all he could not to vomit after swigging at the ale she had left for him. True, he had consumed his fair share of poor alcohol within the penal colony, but this ale left his throat both parched and did nothing to banish or even obscure the taste of mold from his tongue.
He had not even spent a mere five minutes in the woman's company , yet she had succeeded in poisoning him and maddening him to no end with her chirpy voice and fanatical speeches.
The silence, though, was brief until Mrs. Lovett, brandishing her rolling pin like a weapon, said, "That ale's goin' to need a bit more 'elp when it comes to washing my pie down. How 'bout some gin, eh?"
The woman abandoned her rolling pin and began her advance down a small hallway, patting powder from her dress, clearing her throat when the thick substance tickled her nose.
Sweeney had no other option but to follow. She had not waited for his response.
He trudged down the hallway in pursuit of Mrs. Lovett who, to his utter surprise, had remained quiet for well over two minutes.
Observing the walls around him, his eyes caught familiar sight: The stairway that led to both his and his family's rooms. No doubt, the peeling walls and aged appearance signified that no one had used the rooms since his absence. A part of him wished he could rush up the stairs and tear through the rooms until finding something--an article of clothing, one of his wife's hairbrushes--that he could bring to his nose and inhale their faded scent. There had to be an ounce of tangible proof that this run-down place had once been his sanctified home, and its angelic inhabitants had once remained.
The two entered Mrs. Lovett's parlor room, a sensible area for women of the day. Trinkets rested, preserved on oak shelves, their faces still and pale, comfortable, plush loveseats reclined against a wall, and in more than one area, a plump chair rested by the small fireplace. Ashes adorned the hearth.
"Ah, love, yeh like the cheery wallpaper?" Mrs. Lovett inquired while pouring a tumbler of gin for her and her guest. "Suppose luck was on my side the day the chapel burned down, " she handed him a glass and winked, "only partly singed, yeh see."
He dodged a glance at her before circling the clutter space. A small chair caught his gaze and he sat down, hissing a groan of pain as he lowered himself onto the seat. Damned knees.
Mrs. Lovett, though she tried to hide, observed the man through misty eyes until his stone gaze rested on a sparking piece of firewood. She then brought herself onto a chair and traced the rim of her glass with her forefinger.
"Why don't yeh rent out those rooms upstairs if time's are so hard?" he asked after a moment of still.
She opened her mouth in reply, but suddenly thought to herself. Why should one man care about her income? Why is it that he looked around her house with misery fresh in his gaze?
Leaning in towards him, she began to speak, heart beating throughout her entire body. She knew this man, their eyes would not have locked on each other if she had not known him. But the question was: why did this man remind her so much of...?
"Even if I offered room and board up there," she said with a glance upward, "People wouldn't go near 'em. And I don't blame them."
One sentence, and the man's interest was hers.
"Why?" he asked. His brows rose as he inched forward in his chair. The movement was close to inconspicuous, but Mrs. Lovett's keen eye caught sight of it with ease.
"Oh, people think its haunted, and who am I to say they're wrong?"
The man averted his gaze to the glass of gin, swooshing it around and admiring the way the alcohol swayed inside of its glass confinements. It was a capable distraction, but the oncoming question could not be avoided. He had to know.
"What about this place make's people think...its haunted?"
Mrs. Lovett scrunched her brow. Perhaps her suspicions were for naught; maybe this man was a simple traveler with no knowledge of her home and its tragic past.
In spite of her thoughts, she managed a word, and the word transformed into a sentence, spoken aloud after the years of unbearable silence. She had not wished to speak, but this was her moment of truth and she would have it. The peculiar man's reaction would speak far louder than he would, she knew this to be true.
"Many years ago," she began after a sip at her glass, "a barber and his wife lived upstairs. Happy li'l couple with a one year ol' babe to look after," she rasped a sigh, "until the poor bloke was carted off to prison by a judge who coveted the man's wife."
Revealing nothing, Todd gaped at the fire's crackling flames and remained fixated on them. Mrs. Lovett tore her gaze from the side of his face and continued.
"Well, the bloke," she wheezed a lethargic chuckle, "or better yet, Benjamin Barker, remained in prison--"
"What was his crime?" Todd interrupted, eyes still dancing in the flames.
Mrs. Lovett pursed her lips. "Foolishness," she snapped, as if it were an insult.
And the man, taking it as if it had been, folded his hands, still holding the cup, and jerked his head up and down.
Satisfied, the baker picked up at the beginning of her tale--at least, where she had last left off. Sentiment was absent in her voice as the story dragged on.
"The barber's wife, a pretty thing, stayed shut up for days on end, sobbin' and all. After months of the judge tryin' to court her, she received an honorary invitation to the judge's home. Normally, she would 'ave refused, but the judge knew 'ow to bring 'er to him: by promising 'er husband's return."
Sweeney, the tremble in his hands jolting the glass, wished to do nothing other than slam his palms to his ears and leave the ending to the story obscured. Reality taunted him with the truth that he once so desperately sought, and it was that same reality that Sweeney begged to wish away and never face again. Confidence had forsaken him, and to even his shock, he was beginning to long for it.
"She accepted his invite and rushed to his 'ouse," raising a brow, she added," with the Beadle as her escort."
Todd's reaction was just as she had expected. He clutched his gin with hazardous force, his lip curled into a snarl, and his eyes narrowed. The fire glinting in his gaze was enthralling.
It had to be him! Johanna had been right!
"Of course, the judge had thrown a ball, a masquerade, in a fancy way o' speakin', and the poor thing, confused and alone, began to drink. She plopped on one of 'em chairs, after a few sips, and that's where the judge found 'er."
Slamming his body into the chair's back, Todd could only pray that the story would end, that Fate would not have ruined only his life, but his wife's as well. He knew what was to happen, but could he believe it?
His hands unclenched in hopelessness, then crunched together in anxiety.
The scene before him danced in front of his eyes: drunken folk, champagne bubbling from their glasses, women screeching their laughter, hearty men chuckling, a man adorned in a suit of black velvet, a blonde angel cast upon a solitary chair, silently begging for her husband as she looks upon the masked terror.
"And 'e did what most men would do in a situation like such, ravagin' 'er as people gaped and laughed. They thought it to be a bloody good show, they assumed she was mad, only it was 'e who was mad...with lust."
Shrieks clouded the man's mind, like the sounds of gunfire to his ears or a dying man's moans of distress. He could see the people, faces masked with molds of vibrant colors, gathering around a loveseat where his Lucy--his beloved, his wife--lay, taken by a man that was not her husband, by a monster that had only his intentions of releasing the desire, and breaking an innocent.
"The rest of 'em just watched; watched and laughed."
He could hear her screaming, his wife, her voice raw and hoarse. She was crying for him, her husband, and where was he? Thousands of miles away, being carted to his inevitable death as she lay, bleeding upon a Judge's chair.
Bloody, broken, alone; without her defender, her love, her Benjamin.
Lucy's screams melded into his own as he shot to his feet and held his open hands into the air. But no matter how far he reached to grasp Lucy, he could not touch her, he could not grasp her, he could not hold her. She faded into oblivion, leaving him, arms-outstretched, with tears pooling in his eyes. His hand wavered and collapsed against his side.
"Please," he begged, choking back the water in his voice, "would no one show her mercy?"
Instead of an answer, calm, sympathetic, and mournful, Mrs. Lovett jumped to her feet as well. She would have stepped forward too, if the moment was not as solemn as it had become. "It is you," she said, almost breathless, "Benjamin Barker!"
It seemed as if he had not heard her exclamation. Without meeting the woman's eyes, he slowly swiveled around to face his body towards her's. "Where is my wife?" he rasped. Their gazes met, brief at first, his eyes dulling as her own brightened with realization. "Where 's my Lucy?"
The question did take its full affect after a minute of frantic thought. Mrs. Lovett huffed as she plummeted back into her chair, the thinking causing an ache in her frazzled head.
His wife? Where had she gone?
And then, like a slap of memories into her mind, she recalled the fateful night she had begged for a mad woman's life, and stolen a moment of sacred reunion with her guest's lone daughter. Thoughts clicked into their proper place, and she spoke with true grievance in her tone.
She may have loathed Lucy Barker, wishing for her to be whisked away with the winds of time, but never had she ever longed for the women's death.
"Mr. Barker," she said and then grimaced at the sentence's formality, "Benjamin..."
There was a weighty pause and still, the look of consuming sorrow could not be banned from the male's vulnerable gaze. A tear dangled, near the point of plummeting down to trail the man's ghastly cheek.
"Your wife has died."
Sweeney's brow scrunched, his eyes shuttered closed. "How?" he managed to rasp.
Mrs. Lovett, astounded by her guest's heartache, found words to be particularly hard to grasp, let alone speak.
"How?!" Mr. Todd demanded, his eyes shooting open. The growl that strengthened his speech made the baker start.
"The Judge," Lovett sputtered. After a calming breath, she dared meet the man's eyes and finish what had been started. "After the night of the ball, Lucy came home, a right mess."
The woman, now that Lovett thought about it, had arrived home in a frazzled state. Lucy, her dress disheveled and her face bloody, had clutched to Mrs. Lovett's shirt and, through her unfathomable suffering, had croaked the night's nightmarish events. Even now, the baker could remember how the woman's voice shook, gravelly from screaming, her lips bruised where the judge had bitten her.
Afterward, the frantic Lucy had torn the house apart looking for her baby, and when Johanna was nestled in her arms, a terrifying calm washed over her. Lucy rocked the small Johanna well into the night, as if nothing had ever happened, and when she placed the sleeping babe in her crib, she whisked herself away to the nearest apothecary. Her purchase that night, the baker remembered, was that of arsenic, and though she pleaded, begged, and prayed that Lucy would not sip the poison, the blonde smiled, a mournful expression, kissed her baby on her brow, whispering, "I am so sorry, my little sweet."
Mrs. Lovett, spoke. "She downed arsenic that night, and went mad the next. She wouldn't listen to me...I did try...Lucy had gone insane, but she had not died."
Once the arsenic had slipped down her throat and a scream escaped her lips, Mrs. Lovett had demanded that Lucy drop the bottle. The woman had unclenched her fist, producing the bottle, now half drained of its contents. It slipped from her grasp and shattered to the floor. Glass scattered throughout the room, under the bureau and beside the baby's bed. There was a moment of silence, broken by the cries of an awakened Johanna, soon joined by the horrific gasps of a dying mother. Lucy collapsed to the floor, no longer grasping her baby's crib, and slipped her fingers through the grating, caressing her daughter's wet, flushed face one last time. Several minutes of convulsions took place, until the still of certain death had taken its icy grip on the ill-fated woman.
Throughout it all, Mrs. Lovett had remained in the doorway, terrified to move an inch, but finally doing so when the woman's sluggish breathing had returned. Lucy Barker's eyes remained dimmed after the arsenic, a filmy substance clouding her eyes, as if the soul of the once radiant woman was trapped inside. The coating soon faded, leaving her pupils dilated and her eye color changed to a ghastly light blue.
Months had passed, but Lucy remained oblivious to her daughter, her landlady, the absence of Benjamin, the town, and even time itself. Mrs. Lovett had her propped in the guest room's bed until the burden of caring for a sick, deranged woman had become too much to bear. Observing Lucy's skin hang gauntly from her bones, her flesh turn a pale yellow, her hair lose its sheen and fade to grey, was only a detriment to her job and a surplus of agony to the torture of watching an angel fade. She desperately sought a doctor, losing the woman to a hospital in Bedlam rather than a healthy treatment or antidote.
Soon, she was cast from the almshouse and onto the streets where, for the duration of her life, she would wander aimlessly, singing the song that had played on the night of her rape like a comforting lullaby. Once in a while, Mrs. Lovett would take her in and slip her a meat pie, conversing in light tones of Johanna and even her own identity. In response, Lucy sent the woman a blank gaze and cackled ruthlessly at the sight of a familiar customer walking down the street. The joyful young Lucy, now a prostitute, a whore of which men handled with repulsion and sometimes desperation.
The thoughts of the baker had carried her mind away from the present. Shaking her head, she picked at the pieces of her shattered phrases and returned to telling the fateful news to an aggrieved husband.
"Judge Turpin 'ad 'er taken to Newgate prison." A wave of fresh hurt came with the remainder of the recollection. "After Johanna realized who she was."
Questioning, Todd scanned the woman's face. "Johanna?"
"Your daughter...she...Lucy told Johanna 'er name, yeh see. I saw it all 'appen, and poor Johanna was sobbin' a great deal," unnatural tears pricked her eyes, "and the Judge 'eard it all. 'ad your wife sent to prison and declared she would be publicly 'ung a week later." The glass clattered as she dropped it onto a nearby table. She pressed a hand to her head and spoke almost to herself, "I went to the execution out of respect, Mr. Barker. Lucy," she sighed shakily, "...she died peacefully and all; real quick..."
Mr. Todd gasped a dry sob and straightened abruptly at the foreign sound. Never before had he cried--at least not since the death of his former self. Tears, he felt, were useless. If there was anything he ever pondered over when it came to the reason of something's existence, set aside the filth that people had the audacity to call London, it was the pointlessness of crying. It did not nothing for him when he was a con, and now, though he felt he could do nothing but sink to the floor and weep like the doomed, listless Benjamin Barker, tears would be ludicrous.
Truth did its job at ripping his heart, as if physically, from his chest. His wife, raped, with a sniggering crowd as her audience, and killed, with the same spectators smirking their satisfaction at the death of an undesirable. And mercy was never offered nor shown. Why was it that he was appalled by the news? Did Botany Bay not do its job at showing him the terrors of the unmerciful?
His virtuous spouse, defiled and hung...Even that reality still held the air of a lie, a vindictive joke meant to stir even the coldest depths of his heart.
He would kill them all, every bastard that stared at the scene with mirth, every loathsome, dog that had condemned his love to die.
Out of the teary dread in the man's eyes, determination sparked his gaze. He could not mourn, not yet. Lucy was his life, he had learned that over their short, savored marriage. But there was more to his family, thus an accumulation to his weighty concern.
"And what of Johanna?" he could only whisper. Articulating a single sentence in his usual, gruff voice would only betray the emotion behind his words--which were strained enough to begin with.
"The Judge adopted her, raised her like his own, " Mrs. Lovett said.
Irritation made his lip twitch. "Yes, yes, I am well aware, but is she alright?"
The woman looked Todd up and down, almost baffled by the way he disregarded his daughter's whereabouts. How was he "well aware" that his daughter was the Judge's ward? She hissed a sigh, and handled her beverage once again. The gin did nothing to ease the burning curiosity, though it still managed to cake her throat with its substantial tang.
"Is my daughter alright?" he repeated, each word more venomous and intense than the last. Mrs. Lovett thought it to be either irritation from the day's morose turn of events or true protection over his estranged daughter, though she did prefer the more affectionate choice.
"She's fine, Mr. Barker, but--"
For the second time, he abruptly cut the woman off and added, "It's no longer Barker. Benjamin Barker is dead, now. My name is Sweeney Todd."
The callous words would have taken the breath out of any faint-hearted woman. Mrs. Lovett, though, was not like most, and instead, stared questioningly at Sweeney before continuing her butchered statement. She would grieve the loss of her innocent Benjamin, her infatuation, at another time. There was a promise she had to keep.
"Well, then, Mr. Todd, I must say, Australia hasn't been a walk in Hyde Park for yeh...and there is something I have to tell yeh about--"
"And Sweeney Todd will have his vengeance on the Judge, no matter what the cost may be."
"Yes, truly wonderful! Mr. T, I have to--"
Sweeney turned and shrugged his coat off, throwing it into the corner of the parlor. "Fifteen years of torture, nightmares...with that one hope that I would return to my family...what would have been left of them." He burned the floor with his eyes, a comparison in hot intensity to the fire that crackled merrily behind him.
"Mr. Todd, listen to me!"
"My Lucy..."
At her wit's end, Mrs. Lovett rushed to the ex-con, turned him to face her (squashing the urge to squeal at the contact), and thundered, "Mr. Todd, I have to tell yeh something' about your daughter, dammit!"
Taken aback, Todd snarled, "What is it?" Inside, his stomach churned with dread.
The woman sighed in fatigue. "I'd managed to speak with Johanna after Lucy..." the words had died, she could only fragment the sentence and pray the man understood, "well, I spoke with Johanna and she seemed to have known yeh, Mr. T. She was talkin' 'bout yeh like you'd never left London! I told 'er yeh were gone, but she insisted I give you a message."
His spine straightened, his heart seemed to flutter in a strange emotion; delight, perhaps. "What is it?"
"Oh, so now I 'ave your attention, Mr. Todd?!" she said, rolling her eyes. "Nonetheless, 'ere it is, and remember, I don't know what the bloody hell your girl's talkin' about. Johanna said, 'Tell my father, when 'e arrives home, that I love 'im and I'll always be his Little Lady.'" After straining for the right words, Mrs. Lovett muttered, "then she went on about yeh stayin' somewhere safe and all...the child fretted a bit about that."
Sweeney could no longer withhold the rampage of tears. He, panicked, slipped his fingers to his eyes and applied pressure to his lids until dark spots adorned his shadowed vision. The moist in his eyes seemed to have subsided. The pain had not. Somewhere in this cruel, degrading world, his cherished daughter awaited his rescue, loving him though they had been torn from each other's embrace.
Crying remained meaningless, the hurt seemed to have beckoned his unwanted tears.
When he was composed, the man turned towards the baker. The effort of hiding his pain was noble, the results were pitiful.
"I want to see it," he said with a upward gesture towards the ceiling. "The room."
Mrs. Lovett knew all too well what he was referring to. The lost husband wished to pace the room where his wife had attempted suicide, the sad father longed to caress the sheets where his child once slept, the dead Benjamin begged to breathe the dusty air and thaw his frozen memories.
Who was she to deny him the right?
"O' course, Mr. Barker," she said, quickly correcting herself, "Mr. Todd, Todd, Sweeney Todd."
His cross expression contorted to that of misery. "My daughter...she will be alright?"
Sympathetic, Mrs. Lovett leaned in towards him and squeezed his hand. His fingers were limp, cold in her own grasp, like the hand of a dead man. In a flash of movement, he slipped his arm from her grip and held it to his side like a wounded animal.
"Come on, love. I 'ave something upstairs for yeh, somethin' I think you'll like very much."
He nodded once and waited for her to take the lead. She brushed against his side, only so she could feel his body against her own, the feel of the leather jacket against her skin. The brief touch captivated her.
The pair abandoned the warm parlor and began their ascent up the stairs to the Barker's room, nearly as dead as the ruined family.
One lingering question taunted the woman as she led her companion up the flight of stairs: How had Johanna predicted her father's return?
Here you are, everybody. Please leave a review and let me know you're all out there once again! Make my new year whole! And I do hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday as well as a happy new year.
-Moonlit Serenity
