Chapter four! This must be some kind of record. It's a bit short, but the next one (maybe) will be longer. Thanks again to Obscure Bird for beta-ing and to everyone who reviewed.
Tobias Ragg was not a particularly ethical young man; he couldn't afford to be. He had learned at a very early age that people with a squeaky clean set of morals were soon ground into the mud by those with fewer inhibitions. In order to survive on the streets of London, you had to lower your standards somewhat. But though Toby wasn't exactly lily white himself, he knew basic right from wrong. And the things that he was beginning to perceive happening around him—the half-whispered secrets, the dark glances that contained more meaning than they should—seemed wrong in a way he couldn't quite place. He didn't like to doubt Mrs Lovett, or even her rather sinister upstairs neighbour, really, but he could only pretend to ignore the signs for so long.
They were little things, insignificant on their own, but added together, they began to create a disturbing pattern that made Toby shudder if he thought of it for too long. But think of it he did. He thought it was odd that, though he was supposed to help her around the shop, Mrs Lovett had absolutely forbidden him to come with her down to the bake house, and that though he often went into town to run errands for her, he had never once been sent to the butcher's to buy more meat. In fact, he didn't think he'd ever even seen exactly what went into the pies before they were served.
Toby shot a nervous glance across the counter at the baker, who was pounding away mercilessly at a slab of thick, pasty white dough. An unconscious smile curved her lips—a knowing smile full of self-satisfaction and a devious pride in her own cleverness. Toby frowned. There was too much behind that smile. He'd seen it fixed firmly in place as she served the seemingly endless stream of customers, plying them with more food, more ale, urging them to eat slowly, to savour the 'secret recipe.'
It was a pretty smile, but it didn't reach her eyes, eyes that were always straying up the rickety stairs to where Toby knew Sweeney Todd must be standing at his wide window, staring out at the London streets with that odd predatory look in his eyes. Toby had seen the way Mrs Lovett would look at the barber, with an expression of pure devotion that nearly made him sick. He couldn't understand what she saw in that man, always brooding up in his shop, snarling like an animal if anyone came too close. It made no sense to the boy, and he only wished he could make his adopted mother see how unhealthy her infatuation with that demon really was.
At that moment, the woman looked up from dusting the flour off her rolling pin. It hung in the air around her like a ghostly cloud. 'Something you need, Toby, dear?'
The boy realized with a start that he'd been frowning at her for some minutes now, his gaze laced with suspicion. 'I—oh, I, er, was wondering if I could have some more gin, please, ma'am.'
She tutted. 'Going to drink me out of house and home, you are. But since you asked politely…' She set the bottle down in front of him, and returned to the counter, her eyes flicking briefly to the ceiling as she went.
Toby's stomach flipped with an odd sort of apprehension as her features softened at the sight of the grimy boards overhead. Something was definitely not right here, and the boy had decided that he must take it upon himself to find out what it was.
It was funny, Sweeney Todd thought, how such a little bit of information—stupid, trivial information, he reminded himself—could change everything so very much. Now that he knew the truth about his landlady's feelings towards him, Todd couldn't believe he hadn't spotted it before. Every tiny gesture that he had been previously oblivious to—a little melting smile, a touch that lingered just a moment too long—he now construed as yet more evidence of Mrs Lovett's deep-seated adoration of him. Worst of all, there was a tiny, craven part of the barber, huddled away in some dusty corner of his subconscious that enjoyed her affection.
It had been so long since he had experienced any kind of love, welcome or not, that Todd had almost forgotten what it felt like to be wanted. He was horrified to find that small fragment of himself warming to the sensation, remembering old, almost forgotten tenderness, and wanting this new desire from the woman downstairs almost as much as he wanted sometimes to sink his darling razor into her all-too-lovely throat. He would have ignored her if he could, but he knew now that she would only stand at his door with those ridiculous puppydog eyes until he sullenly relented.
So the barber tolerated Mrs Lovett, appearing, to all intents and purposes, unchanged in his attitude towards her. In truth, however, his feelings about the woman shifted with every time he laid eyes on her. There were days when he was hardly aware of her presence—so lost was he in tender thoughts of the past, or violent ones of the future—and other times when she would look at him, eyes wide with an innocence a woman of her years and experience should not still possess, and he would think that maybe the life after his vengeance didn't have to be so desolate after all. Then the next day he would find his fingers itching to wring her neck, simply to put an end to that happily chattering voice.
Sweeney Todd didn't like not knowing how he felt about anyone or anything; he didn't like being uncertain. He stared out the window, down at the dirty street where the hunch-backed old beggar woman was making her rounds. Mrs Lovett, to him, was all uncertainty. She was a puzzle, a locked door, and he resolved then to find just what unspoken secrets she might be hiding.