October 31, 1835. London, England. 4:18 am.
The moon slips out of London at night.
She used to know the faint trace of early moonlight in the evening very well, like a lover, like a part of him. That was a time where she did not just sit on the cold stone floor of her cell and wait for her hair to grow back. When it grows back, she thinks, it will be gold like it used to be, and it will be long enough that she could tangle it around her neck and…
Lucy Barker has more failures than she can count.
The biggest one is the foolish notion that maybe she could have saved him, could have given herself up the first time, could still have a barber and daughter and a nice bed with pillows. It's the guilt that's eating up her wits, not the arsenic in her blood or the memory of the man in the red robe. Benjamin could be seeing the moon in Australia and remembering. He could be getting whip lashes from a snarling warden. He could be dead.
And it could be her fault.
The wardens here are drunks, the whole lot of them. One of them has this skinny little daughter with these beady little blue eyes, and her footsteps haunt the asylum day and night. Lucy's not sane, but she knows this girl doesn't belong here. And she fights the desire to grab her and show her the way out of here.
Lucy knows.
If she removes two of the floor stones and shift a few more just so, she slip into the empty space. There's a stairway there and a system of old hallways. When she can't sleep, she moves the floor stones and disappears into the labyrinth below her. She sits in the darkness of the hallway and rocks herself, tears streaming silently down her face. Sometimes she pretends she is Johanna, and Lucy and Benjamin are singing her a lullaby. It'll all be beautiful come spring, they say. Come again spring. But she is Lucy, so that Lucy is dead and Johanna was… is…
Yesterday, Lucy stole ink from one of the wardens. She intended to write a letter to Benjamin, but she had no paper, so she dripped little dots of black ink on the floor. The ink bottle is half-empty now, and now she just draws a line on the wall. One line, and soon she tracing the entire downstairs labyrinth. She realizes that if she follows all the pathways she's mapped out, it'll lead to the London sewers and…
The sea. She's there twenty minutes later.
Little Lucy weeps and watches the shadows of the boats that'll sail at dawn. She could go away forever, but Mrs. Lovett wouldn't give her any money. There is nowhere for her to go except maybe an alleyway or a whorehouse. People lose things, she thinks, it happens. She sees the silhouette of a woman and her son in a nearby window, and she can imagine her words to him because they are the Lucy's words too…
There are people who have it in their hearts to love, and they are just waiting for you to find them.
Fin.