Chapter 36
Turpin's Mansion
For the first time in her entire life, Johanna stared upward towards her attacker and basked in the raw fear that poured from his gaze. It was she who had instilled it, it was she who held the advantage, now of all nights.
The power, though, could only last for the moment; for it was the fear that provoked the Judge's words. "Beadle, proceed with the plan."
With that, the strength, the brazen courage, all deserted the girl, leaving her to battle a frightened child's dread.
The Beadle hesitated for a moment, staring at Johanna as if he thought her father would appear out from under the bed and strangle him if he even approached the child.
"Beadle, do it this instant!"
The threat of an ominous judge seemed far more hazardous than the possibility of an ex-con appearing from thin air, and so, lurching forward, Bamford seized Johanna's forearms in his plump hands and avoided her wide-eyed horror.
"No, I cannot go to an asylum!" she cried as Turpin stationed himself in front of the door, pointing with a crooked finger in mock replication of a demented foot soldier.
"Get her out!"
Grunting from pressure, the man hauled a thrashing Johanna merely two feet before her fists began to pummel against his chest, winding his lungs, a burn in his gut. "My lord," the Beadle grumbled, "assistance?"
Nearly as afraid to touch the girl as the Beadle, and duly noted in his hesitance, Turpin groaned a sigh and gripped his ward's flailing wrists. Bamford coiled both arms around the girl's midsection and brought her feet into midair with ease, she had barely any weight to her, but the last burst of persevering adrenaline had yet to die.
They managed to cart her through the hall to the peak of the stairs, prepared to wrestle her winding arms and the battering blows of her feet as they descended. When they did so , their grips on the girl slackened, and she nearly tumbled down to the unforgiving floor in response. The Beadle had wrenched her upright by clutching chunks of golden hair, thus avoiding the risk of her falling, yet a pitiless gesture.
Her cries brought the majority of the house's staff to the main hallway--mainly the few maids that remained, now somber spectators to the girl's perturbing relocation. Every soul watched, yet not one offered Johanna assistance. They did not dare.
Shouting, sobbing, every movement restrained by strength that disgraced iron chains, her feet began to drag on the floor by the tips of her toes, and her body wobbled like elastic. "I'd rather die!! Let me die!"
The front door lay just before the group and the Judge released her arms to fling it open. The opportunity gifted her with a chance at swinging her fists, an addition to Bamford's aggravation, and a draining loss of her vigor--or at least the little she had left.
"If you wish for death, then seek it in the asylum. I wish to have nothing more to do with you..until you've learned," Turpin seethed, glare digging into the side of an awaiting coach beyond the mansion's steps.
The bitter London air hit the girl; the night was a blanket of shadows upon the paved streets. Her chest ached with each step taken towards it as she attempted to pry the Beadle's strangling hands from her stomach. Her fingers burned with effort, her arms soon collapsed and their failure tugged at her shoulders.
Turpin flung the carriage door open as the driver willed himself to gaze away from the sight of a young girl tossed aside, a plump Beadle soon to follow.
Johanna sunk deep into the coach's worn seating, capable of crying dry tears only, and her hoarse scream felt like nails scratching at her throat when her head was jerked forward to face the Judge.
"If this is to be the last I see you, then remember this: You, ungrateful baggage, have earned all I have in store for you! Every last bit of it!" Turpin appeared enraged, murderous even, but beneath it all, he seemed tired. "Blame yourself for this wretchedness, blame the sailor boy, and if what you have told me is indeed true, blame the man who could not shield you from everything in this world." His tone shrunk. "Blame your father." He retreated from the coach, stating his last words in a clear tone, though cries built behind it, and he refused to look her way. "All men have earned the sentence of a hanging, Johanna, but only the mad receive it."
The coach door slammed, the sound of hooves upon stone bounced from London's confining walls, and distant shouting resounded from behind the carriage.
Johanna squirmed free of the Beadle's binding arms and pressed her face to the coach's window. Her eyes skimmed Anthony Hope's perusing form and twitched when tears began to sting. As the carriage's pace hastened, Anthony began to meld into the surrounding darkness, a member of the shadow's nightly vigil.
From it all, she could hear Anthony's faint shouts. "Where do you take her? Tell me or--"
"Kill me!" the Judge roared and the sound echoed to her ears, inside of her head. "Kill me if you dare!"
Anthony could not kill, she knew this, but a crevice in her sobbing heart prayed he did.
The sound of traveling hoofs and her futile weeps swallowed the remote voices of rage--rage that she never imagined hearing from a gentle soul such as Anthony. Perhaps her assessment on humankind in general was a bit skewed. Her father's perception seemed a tad more accurate.
She shook her head, placing her face into her palms.
A mental asylum...
"Is it true?" the Beadle questioned after minutes passed, the absence of human voices penetrating.
Johanna raised her head. A sheet of gloom dimmed her young eyes. "Is what true, sir?"
"What you had said...about your father..." The Beadle gulped, continued, "Did you truly meet him in...in Botany Bay?"
An unfitting, grief-stricken smile--though now a common expression--played with her lips. "Yes, Beadle, I did."
Nodding, perhaps in defeat or acceptance, the Beadle stuck his head towards the window, observing their location. He squinted at the coat of black that had draped over the town, the terrain that began to perplex him. "Driver," he called out into the night in his nasally tone, "where are we now?"
"Just coming up to Fleet Street, sir!"
Johanna's hand, on involuntary impulse, shot to her throat in silent imploration for the air that evaded her. Voices whispered into her ear and swam in the depths of her memories.
"F-F-Fleet Street?" Johanna whispered, broken. Her body crammed closer into the adjacent side of the coach and her face peered outside, eyes losing themselves to the enrapturing abyss of night. Street lamps swirled and encircled in vibrant patterns as the carriage continued on its way, the horses trotting with jolting strides , late night strollers observing the noble transport with inquisitive scowls.
The Beadle massaged his aching temples, oblivious to his captive's climaxing anticipation, the strange energy that sped through her blood. Her neck vibrated, her stomach lurched, and her fingers curled around the handle of the carriage door. Her heart smashed against her neck, almost to the point of seeing it's hurried pulse through her chest.
Johanna skimmed over the jagged memory of her father's home address, other thoughts beset. She spared the Beadle a final glance, detected his lack of attention, and returned her greedy stares to the door handle. Her actions were quick, swift with coordinated precision, and were quick to indicate belated misjudgment . For when she had jerked the door open, and she threw herself from the stagecoach at its breakneck speed, she had plummeted into the sharp, brutal, and uneven stone of London's street.
Her arm snapped back as soon as it smashed against the road with a jarring crack. Her teeth slammed together and pierced the inside of her cheek, drawing a sluggish ooze of blood that slipped down her throat. It was pain beyond deliberation, beyond reality, as if she fallen onto a naked rapier and its edge had sliced through her shoulder like butter, and burrowed deep within her chest. The excruciating battle raged between the ache of her lower body and the pitiless, indescribable fire she felt ripping at her arm. More pain than Turpin's hands, more shock than that delivered at the end of another's fists, more fear in her clogged head than ever before.
The Beadle's shouts were heard for a meek second, and then drowned in deplorable comparison to her own.
With her unscathed arm and rubbery legs, Johanna heaved herself forward and began to crawl.
She had yet to stop screaming.
186 Fleet Street
Sweeney Todd ignored Mrs. Lovett's chatter, quite preoccupied with the pedal to the floor's trapdoor to even entertain a word. Years of constructing houses and barracks, hauling fallen timber and carts filled with heaps of dead, and a simple barber's chair proved to be the most challenging Yet, the plan was quite ingenious, he allowed himself a moment of self glory. First, he would kill the customer selected, stomp on the pedal, the chair would tilt in mechanical response, and the trapdoor would drop to an open. The dead man would be swallowed by the hole in the floor after dumped backwards, head first, and the bake house floor would greet his bear head in eager welcome. There was still conflict over what to do with the deceased, seeing Mrs. Lovett had to argue over the matter, but Mr. Todd was carefully formulating a way to lure the baker into cooperating. And once she had agreed, his mastermind plans would be brought to an artful finale.
"Mr. T, what you're doin' to me Albert's chair is more of a crime than the one yeh were convicted of!" Mrs. Lovett exclaimed from across the room.
Sweeney's head shot up. "That's because I didn't commit a crime," he said.
Lovett furrowed her brow and a frown limped to her mouth. "Then you're makin' up for lost time!" she countered.
He spat a sigh. "Go make some pies, woman. I'm busy..."
"Pies? You're planning on massacring the whole bleedin' city and I'm supposed to bake pies?"
"To bring the people in...Good pies means good business..." he returned his hands to work, "More customer will come to me..."
"Thank yeh, love, there ain't nothin' like good economic tutoring from an ex-convict," she said in dry opposition.
In a fit of anger, he threw an empty box, which held a dozen rusted nails, to the ground. The wood splintered, the sound like the crack of lightening, and he stepped towards the baker, a fuming provocation.
In spite of the air's rising tensions, Mrs. Lovett chuckled. Her voice was strained, but soon, coated with false sociability. "Yeh know that I support yeh, dear, in everything yeh do. Sure, London is a bit on the offensive side..."
"And I will kill them all for what they've done to my family," he whispered, more so talking to himself than the woman. He lifted his head after a moment of deathly silence, now speaking directly to his partner. "And this was your idea, by the way."
"Mr. T..." her voice trailed off, then continued with an exertion of volume, "I was bein' a bit sarcastic when I told yeh to bake murdered clients into me pies...bad, bad joke on my part."
His eyes were knives to her own. "Like I said, your idea. You take part."
"Yeh can't be bleedin' serious," she moaned, and for the first time in all of her years, cursed her satirical wit.
There was a dragging calm as the demon gazed at her, assessing the woman to find a fatal flaw. It took him less than a flying second, and before the baker could recoil, Mr. Todd had stood, strong and tall, and glided to her side. "But, my love," he said, a caressing whisper sliding ice down the woman's back, "I can't hope to do any of this without you...it's much like a man navigating the sea without his map. It's not very possible, is it now?"
"I suppose not, Mr. T," she folded her arms in front of her breast, as if to barricade his possessive charm, "but then again, yeh managed to."
His chuckle was raspy and forced, much like he did so just to kindle stale warmth. "Touché, pet."
Both clung to stability, to stubborn will-power as they glared at their foe.
"It'll surely boost your business...a grand reopening...," he coaxed, returning to his strategizing mind, "And as soon as we have proper income and the Judge is ash in the bottom of your oven, we'll bring back the regular meat."
Shaking her head, the woman's grasp on her fortitude slipping to a dangerous edge, she muttered, "I can't carry the bodies by myself, Mr. Todd...," her eyes gathered into a stormy glower, "and Lord knows Toby ain't gettin' involved in any of this."
The man smirked, satisfied with her weak attack, and indicated the discarded pieces of the barber chair. "The chair will deliver them straight into the bake house. I've arranged it that way...We both will get to work after it's completed." After she let him finish!
"I still haven't said yes, Todd," she muttered.
"Oh, but Mrs. Lovett," inching even closer, he slipped a hand on the flat of her back, "your help would please me so very much...You want to please me, don't you?" He tried at a genuine smile, but his eyes danced with flames, a fiery fragment of Hell itself.
She could have worshipped those eyes days on end.
"Course, love," she said. Her back arched against his palm, "I aim to please."
The smile flew to his eyes, his lips drew into a smirk. The hand snatched away from her body as if burned by her skin. "Good," was all he said, and he turned to his incomplete project with that same icy grit that seemed to coexist forever in contrast with the heat of his rage.
The apathy was a perfect motive for the baker's opposition, and she continued with animosity. "We may 'ave future plans made, but not once 'ave yeh mentioned wot is to become of Johanna. After all, yeh are 'er parent, and even though you've discarded her like that heap of nails, I'm sure she wouldn't be 'appy to know 'er papa is a murderous--"
The woman cut off her words, not out of fear or because of the barber's brute reaction, but because of her, dare it be said, pity. There sat her opponent, gazing up with the lost look of mourning, the mist of tears that soon inundated his eyes, the bitter droop of his spine, and the parental urge he had just begun to bury, battling for a chance at thriving once again. It was an unfair attack, his one weakness that held the power to end his very life used against him in a matter of such spite. It was a battle in which both Lovett and himself were his opponent.
"No, not Johanna... I'd die before discarding her," his breath began to tremor, "H-how could you say such?" The question was not directed towards Lovett, but even so, it was a question nonetheless, and such was directed towards himself. He weighed her words, and felt a partial truth blossoming into something bigger. A full-blown, crushing, accusation.
"Oh, love. I shouldn't have--"
You're right!" he roared, back on his feet, glaring at her with all the blame she could undergo. "You shouldn't have!!"
A man gazed at a woman, his fierce glower enough to kill, and a woman dared to meet his eyes, ashamed of her harsh words though she had been greeted with similar malice her entire life. A woman and a man, alone in a room filled to the brim with tension. And not one of them spoke.
And then, a distant scream from the outside world swept through the shop, London's reminder of the reality that neither could evade.
At first, both Sweeney and Lovett did not pay the faint cry any heed. It was London, crime at night was like clouds in her daily skies, filth in her weary trodden streets.
There was another cry, and this time, it snagged the attention of both barber and baker, though Mrs. Lovett was held captive to the sound. Todd brushed it off.
The scream was closer than first regarded, the shrieks of a young girl in obvious distress, but the agony she must have been undergoing was just inconceivable. The girl sounded as if she were being bludgeoned to death, as if she were having her limbs slowly ripped from her body, as if she were succumbing to a violent, atrocious, and unbearable end.
Sweeney Todd had heard those sounds every day of his life, if not in reality, then in his mind, in the visions that prodded and ridiculed, never once leaving him with a minute's peace. The images of men, eaten raw as they slept, young boys sobbing as they were forced into an older con's bunk, gunshots and the metallic puncturing of skin...The day was unnatural if he did not relive it.
Just to feed curiosity's hunger, Mrs. Lovett maneuvered her way around strewn chair parts to the window and gaped outside. What she saw widened her eyes, stole her breath, iced her arms, her legs, her face so that the expression of unnerving shock remained carved into her pale features.
Sweeney Todd looked over towards Eleanor in questioning. "Mrs. Lovett?"
She did not answer. Her eyes had trained into space, to a certain area in the street.
A girl, as the screams had indicated, was sprawled on the street to the far right. Lovett had to crane her neck to catch a better view of the child in distress, and yet, she almost cursed the vivid visibility. There, with her arm tucked beneath her stomach and blood dripping down her chin in the streetlamp's orange glow, was a tiny, blonde child, clawing at the floor if only to move an inch more down the road.
Nellie's natural instinct had already alerted her to the situation, she would not have come to investigate the scene otherwise. However, a different urge sent a course of realization through her body and her feet flying across the shop, leaving Todd alone and baffled.
The child, damned if it was not, held too much similarity to the barber's daughter for the woman to cast aside.
And so, an alarmed, suspicious baker on the chase, Eleanor Lovett tore through the door and down the stairs, scurrying through the brisk night to the child's side.
"Johanna?" the woman stammered, her voice crumpled and collapsed. She could whisper, but she could not speak. "Lord, Johanna, is that yeh?"
The girl, spewing breath from the effort, lifted her head towards the baker. The street's light reflected in her bleeding arm and in her watery eyes, half closed from the labor of such pain. Her mouth was ajar, one arm twisted at the joint and held to her breast as blood smeared her ivory skin.
None other, much to the woman's horror, than Johanna Barker.
"Please," the child gasped through her teeth, sticky blood stretching on her lips as she spoke, "don't let him get to me." The girl's injured arm reached towards Mrs. Lovett and shook with violent pressure until collapsing to the stone street. Johanna screeched from the impact and the woman knelt, or rather crumpled, to her knees. "Where's father?" The whimper, with quiet words pressed against stone floor, stabbed at Lovett's heart.
"He's home, dearie," Lovett said. She drew the girl's head in her lap, stroked her crimson coated locks, and shot a frantic glance towards the shop's illuminated window a few yards down.
As the woman assessed Johanna's injuries with solemn eyes, her stares brushed over the blood that seeped through the lower half of the girl's dress and began to dry, as if she had acquired an injury in that exact spot an hour or so prior...
Through with waiting for the insufferable woman to return, the barber stalked over to the window and tore at the night with his eyes in search of what had caught her attention. It did not take him long to find it; his keen eye caught sight in a fleeting instant. A child was crumpled on the street, yellow hair in disarray, and the baker clutched her close, speaking words that the window did not permit him to hear. A meager crowd of late night strollers began to gather around the scene.
A bond tugged on his body, a bond he had not felt in what seemed to be years. It awakened him, brought life to his mind. It was the very bond that connected him to his child when she first came to him and nearly destroyed him when she had been taken.
Johanna...
HIs heart dropped, and electrifying trepidation pervaded the man's body. If his eyes had not betrayed him and that was his Johanna, sprawled on the ground...God, could he dare let himself believe?
He was hesitant, doubtful of his senses, almost reluctant to trust them, but all the uncertainties seemed to recoil when he caught sight of the Beadle, stomping over the area, pudgy face wrinkled in fury. Now he knew the truth: the agonized child, the battered cherub in the streets, was indeed his daughter. His old heart soared, joy granting it wings... And then, the choking fear returned, for his eyes once again caught hold of the advancing Beadle. He had mere seconds to get to Johanna before Bamford did.
Mr. Todd's legs were quicker than his thoughts. A year had been lived in a second, and he had already ripped through the shop's door, scrambled down the creaking steps, and dashed towards his daughter, all pain in his legs gone, his thoughts nearly as tangled as his heart's sloppy pulse. The liveliness of fatherhood, alive and flourishing in his heart, the urge to shield his only child from all who meant her harm, it had all returned. He had not felt this vigorous, this refreshed, in almost a year.
Johanna...
He had reached the spot, almost sent a pair of spectators to the floor after crashing into their sides, and stood aloof as he stared towards the ground, seeking the girl's gaze. His eyes met her own and the two stared at the other, the girl's cries frozen, the father now a slave to immobility.
They simply stared at each other, relishing the bond and how it grew taut as their eyes danced together in jovial reunion. He was alive and she was alive.
Life had regained a purpose.
Glittering joy shimmered in the young girl's matured eyes, her smile brought brief light to the street, and she struggled to a sitting position with the baker's assistance. There was blood on her arms, but not a trace of pain was reflected in her perfect, young face. Tears slipped down her cheeks, tears that ripped the barber's heart to bloody tatters.
Johanna, his daughter, his child, his sweet, stolen heaven. So close, so alive.
It was all too surreal. He must have died and been offered the heaven he could never receive.
"Papa!" she exclaimed, but her words were lost to the buzz of conversation around them. Her thin arms stretched towards him.
When his stupor had been broken, and any misgivings with it at the beautiful chime of her words, he brought his hands forward, prepared to hold his daughter, his reason for life itself. There was an elation in his heart, he had long forgotten the presence of the living world.
Sweeney's feet had not even left the ground when Beadle Bamford appeared and wrenched the child upward by her dainty shoulders, away from her father's opened hands and the baker's tender grasp. Such barbaric force, and the child had not shattered before his eyes.
With this, Todd's heart leapt in fear and he stared at his daughter, begging God, the world, London, anything capable of hearing his forlorn pleas, that his daughter not be taken from him again. Not again, a second blow like that would surely kill him.
As the Beadle's arms wrapped around her, her face was cloaked with terror and she began to scream, to tear at his hands, to grope the air for her father. The father that lay just before her, yet so out of reach. "No! NO! Don't take me from him!"
"For the love of God, Beadle," a man exclaimed, pushing his way to Sweeney Todd's side. "Help the child! She is obviously injured." From the corner of his eye, Sweeney recognized the speaker to be the wealthy man from the market. The man who had first inquired about his shop on Fleet Street with his freshly shaven beard and flawless pronunciation. Though the man struck Todd as familiar, an encounter before the market that he could not recall, his stare remained fixated on the struggling Johanna.
Bamford's eyes ensued in a panicked chase from one person's eyes to the next. After jolting the girl to his side, one arm still wrapped around her waist, he shrugged off his coat and threw it over her head, blinding her vision and obscuring her face from sight. One arm still sleeved, he pressed his palm to the top of the hooded head, declaring to the crowd, "She's mad! Back away, the child is mad!"
"No," the barber gasped, clutching at the empty air, " She's not mad...she's not..." And then Todd was plummeting through cold reality, through the horrors that both he and his child had been thrust into, and now the current nightmare that stood before him, like a living monster he could not slay. He could not have Johanna back, she was being stolen from him for the second time in his wretched life. He could not kill the Beadle, there were too many witnesses. He could not snatch her away from the man, he held her as if onto sanity itself. There was nothing he could do, yet that had always been his life. Helplessness.
Mrs. Lovett whirled to face him, clutched his jacket. "We 'ave to do somethin'," she demanded, frenzied, with a pleading look to her unsettled eyes.
Johanna's muffled shriek and the shouts of a few citizen's were a hazardous addition to the brimming disorder. Many had begun to question the veiled girl's identity.
The strange, familiar man by their side bellowed, "That child is not mad, sir, and I'll be damned to Hell if I am incorrect!"
Grunting, his eyes ablaze with fresh lunacy, the Beadle snapped the girl's arm back and roared over her wails of pain, "Then so be it, man! Burn, burn as if the entire city were on fire! But step back, Goddamn you all, or each one of you will hang by your necks from the gallows!"
The crowd fell to a death-like silence, and since the majority of the insignificant mass were of lower class, they fled from the Beadle, and in doing so, from any threat of impending punishment.
The wealthy man, with his jaw clenched, sent Sweeney and the cloaked girl a crushed glance, turned on his boot heel, and departed from the scene at the very mention of the law.
"The same goes for you, barber," Bamford spat as he jutted his chin towards the scattering crowd. "Leave."
Mr. Todd's face was solid, showing no indication of hearing a word from Bamford."She's in pain," he whimpered.
Just as the Beadle parted his plump lips to reprimand Todd with thrice the authority, a cry from the end of the street lashed at the night's biting air.
"Johanna!! Johanna!!" Even in his impaired state, Sweeney could distinguish Anthony's voice anywhere. It drew close each passing second, but Todd did not turn to investigate, nor did he speak to the baker, or shift his weight or blink or breathe. A cutting breeze beat against his torso.
Dread churned in Beadle Bamford's gaze and, without another moment wasted on hesitance, he hauled Johanna along in the opposite direction with a hand coiled on the nape of her neck. Her wobbling legs could barely keep the pace and they gave way constantly . Their carriage could be discerned from the dimness of the streets, both doors thrown open like a vulture's wings. The driver was reclining on the back of the buggy, pouting in impatience, his face masked by shadows. When Bamford was close enough, the driver trudged forward and took part in heaving the child into the carriage.
"No! Leave her be!" Anthony shouted past the remnants of the crowd, and at the time, all who remained was the fretting baker and the motionless barber, the barber whose hands had collapsed to his sides, waiting for the world to come back to him piece by piece.
It never did.
Sweeney grasped a fistful of the boy's shirt before he could take another hurried step and hauled him backwards. Struggling, the seams of his shirt tearing, Anthony cried, "I have to get to her, let me go!" His young voice cracked and fell as if her were about to collapse into sobs.
The barber remained resilient. He whirled to boy to face him, clutched his narrow shoulders, and silenced the diminutive cries with his deep, commanding tone. "The girl!" he demanded, and Anthony could even sense the cracking panic within Mr. Todd's words, "Where are they taking the girl?"
Anthony gave a limp thrust of his arm towards the carriage at the end of the way. "I do not know, Mr. Todd!" He pressed his forefinger to his eye sockets, wiping at the tears ."God, they'll lock her away forever!"
The barber's head spun to the carriage, to the boy, back to the carriage. Each glance directed towards the end of Fleet Street delivered a terrorized frown, a worried, scrunched brow, a set of widened eyes that reflected nothing short of pure instinct. So wild, so controlling, so alive. A faint push stirred his soul again, and that push--be it from the hands of guiding providence or ill-fated doom---was what sent his body into a surge of motion, and the dark world passed him as a vague blur while he dashed onward, the sailor and baker long forgotten within his wake.
The carriage shifted forward and then pounced to life at growing speed.
Todd's legs collided into his chest when he brought then upward, his hands pierced the hissing air; he ran with greater agility that his escape through the South African mountains, the labyrinth of terrain littered with spiky debris that cut his feet into pulpy, scarlet ribbons.
The carriage did have a greater lead, but the distance between it and the man was sparse, closing in with each sprinted lunge. He would wrench the coach door open once he had reached it, dispose of both the driver and Beadle, and cram his little daughter to his chest. He would demand everything from her; demand that she fill his heart with the humanity he had lost, the joys only a true father could relish, everything and anything she could manage to give him. The bastards had taken half of his living soul from him, and he would ride through Hell to reclaim it.
Hell was London's streets.
The carriage rounded a corner, he followed it. Never did his steps falter, though his lungs dropped to the floor, his chest compressed, the wind brought moisture to his black eyes. Never a pause, never a break in his pace, that is, until he saw the minor group of constables idly standing and peering at the peculiar scene. Scowls were imprinted on their moon-white cheeks.
There was a momentary hesitation in the barber's pace, but he was blind to any dangers, blinded by the paternal extinct--which he felt would be his very demise-that had gone masked, but never disposed of. Here it was, thriving in his chest. A group of policeman, he thought, could not do shit to stop him.
Anthony Hope, on the other hand, managed to.
There was a tug on his forearm, a desperate pull on his shoulder, and the world around him shifted position. After reevaluating his surroundings, Mr. Todd realized the sailor had bested him in the chase and threw his knees to the ground after clutching onto the barber's arm, with hopes that gravity would be of greater assistance than his contrasting--in a word: weak--strength.
"Mr. Todd, please," the boy said, gaze shifting to the aloof officers, "they're constables! You will be apprehended if you take another step!"
Todd hissed something foul beneath his breath and shifted to slip from the boy's grip in an inconspicuous fashion.
"Leave Johanna to me, sir...I'll find her."
Todd retorted in a shout, caution rejected. "No! She isn't yours to find!"
"Is there a problem, sirs?" an officer ventured as he stepped from the curb to the street. In his hand, the tip of his nightstick began to protrude from beneath the heavy, black coat.
"Course not, Gents," Mrs. Lovett huffed to the officers after dragging herself beside the two. She paused for a few more gasping breaths and swallowed several times to slow her smothering heartbeat--she had never been enthusiastic toward running. "In fact, they're goin' home this very minute." In silent warning, she grasped Mr. Todd's unoccupied sleeve and began to drag the man from the spot after bidding the constables a good night.
A brief stillness bound the barber, and then, the inner demons waged a war of complete hellfire. "I'll kill you both; get off! I don't give a shit who sees me slit your bloody throats!"
"Pardon me?" the same officer demanded as his mates' attention drew to the scene.
"He's downed a bit too many," Anthony lied this time, and Mrs. Lovett nodded in agreement, if only to stomp surreptitiously on Todd's foot with her heel. He took no head and continued to rage on, though he kept himself as composed as any drunkard would while in the presence of the foreboding law; a noble effort.
They had made it at least a few yards before the officers were out of hearing range, and Sweeney Todd's restraint had failed, and his tyrannous approach clashed with Mrs. Lovett's.
"You, and that boy, and those Goddamned officers!" he roared, too lost in his anger to speak accordingly.
"Mr. Todd, you're goin' home, now!" she replied with clear articulation of her words to simply irk him.
He tossed her aside and pointed his unsheathed razor, which he had gripping in midflight, towards her face. His breath was ragged against her clammy skin and she drifted into the silence for a mere second until she was lost in it, like a child caught in the rip current.
"You don't know anything, dammit! You don't know what it feels like to have a child taken from you!" His words pinched off and he ripped both their hands from his arms, the anger ridding him of emotion. "Peel your heart from your chest and perhaps you'll gain a faint idea!"
"She's gone, Mr. T," the woman whispered and pointed to the end of the street. Her action was near dead and her eyes mocked the gesture. "The buggy road out o' sight a few minutes ago. Yeh didn't see it...and yeh kept at running..."
The fire was not purged, yet it dimmed in his eyes. She could see his soul reflected in his face--how young he would have been had it not been for Botany Bay--and the flicker of life writhed in his dying stares. It was like watching a living human die away. "No, not my daughter," he denied in a breathy, empty tone, "the coach is close by...I'll get her back now."
"Mr. Todd, the lady is right. Johanna is long gone," Anthony attempted to soothe, but his words fell pungent, devoid of sentiment. "I'll look for her, sir, do not worry." He began to lead the way, a good foot ahead of the pair. "Come, you must return home."
A strange emptiness swallowed the man whole at that instant; his body plunged to the depths of numbness. He did not decline, he did not agree, he walked with the sailor and baker, weary of his unsettling surrender, and spoke not a word until they turned back onto Fleet Street.
"There yeh are, love, back home." Mrs. Lovett's words, though meant for endearing purpose, jabbed at every part of Todd's hollow body. The very words she had spoke, now the words he could only dream he would someday say to his child. Home. A place of gentle warmth, undying affection, cheery laughter, now a prison, cold desolated, and barren to even the slightest comfort. There was an absence of youthful essence in this prison, an absence of wholeness , of a slender hand clutched in his.
Johanna was lost, gone, and he had been stupid enough to allow himself a glimmer of hope after swearing he would maintain a distance from even the thought of his daughter. He was a traitor and she was gone. He was a wretched liar...and she was gone...Never to be seen, never to be found, broken, bloody, left for dead.
And he was falling.
Stone kissed his knees and they bled in acrimonious return. Filth seeped through his trousers, the coldness of it caked onto his skin, a thick coating he would never cleanse himself of.
Raw, inhuman cries burst free from his body, his barred cage, and he howled towards the blackened ash of London sky, a soulful lament for the damned.
Anthony Hope sent a worried glance towards the mourning barber and fled past them, opening his mind to navigate the streets and receiving darkness in return.
Mrs. Lovett's eyes fell from her barber, she entered her tiny meat shop, and left him alone to drown in his grief, brought to his knees on the grimy, forsaken road, forcing his clenched fists to his eyes, keening over like a dying animal.
I do apologize for the wait and I hope the length of this chapter compensates for it. Please review and thank you all!