Notes: This is posted as it was when I finished it. I might not have caught all of the possibly typos/mistakes, so if you find one please PM me to let me know what and where it is. (The phrase "them that were in charge" was written that way on purpose.)
I would also like to let you know that no matter how the last 'scene' reads, I did not intend it to be anywhere close to character-bashing.
Tobias Ragg was not an idiot. He may not have been the smartest boy, and ocassionally not the brightest spark around, but he was smart enough to have lived this long without dire mishap. He was smart enough to know that something was going on. The little clues just kept piling up the longer he stayed under Mrs. Lovett's roof.
It had been like that in the work house. Little clues that led you to horrible truths. At first, once the orphanage had sold you to the mill, or the factory, you thought it wouldn't be so bad. Two meals a day, a bed of your own, and a bit of hard work that never killed anyone. When you were old enough, you would leave, and that would be that... Not so. First you saw the hollow-eyed stares of some of the boys, especially the comely ones; Then you started to hear the tiny whimpers in the middle of the night, when you couldn't quite sleep properly anymore because the thoughts had started tumbling around your head. You noticed the tiny leering smiles of them that were in charge.
Even those that were paid, the older ones who kept things in order, the wages were small. It was barely enough to live on. So why did they stay on? Why, when there were easier jobs, when there were higher paid positions elsewhere, did they continue to work in those places?
Eventually you came to realise... They did it because they liked it. They liked to watch those quick, small hands when they were broken by machines or stuck by needles. They liked to slip upstairs, to pick a boy whose face was pretty and whisper things to him, hands darting under grimy sheets.
A part of Toby was deeply ashamed that he'd kept his eyes squeezed shut whenever he heard them pass, knowing that he was too plain-looking, but desperately hoping they wouldn't stop at him just the same. He hated that he'd never done a thing about it. He hated that he'd seen new boys who came in capable of smiling and faded into silent, haunted shadows as the weeks passed on. He hated that he'd been so grateful to be taken into Pirelli's service that he hadn't even said goodboye...
The clues here were different.
The clues were in the way that Mrs. Lovett would smile at Mr. Todd, the way her breathing would quicken sometimes. It was in how she spoke to herself sometimes when she baked - he could sometimes hear the muffled sound of her voice when he walked past the door that led down to the basement kitchen - and how she flatly refused to let him go downstairs. Mrs. Lovett, Toby knew, was infatuated with Mr. Todd. And at first Toby had thought that was stupid, her sole fault, her small bit of naivety. Mr. Todd didn't care. How could he care? He looked as if he didn't possess emotion or care about anything but his razors and his barber shop upstairs.
But the longer Toby stayed, the more he began to notice the way that Mr. Todd would gain a certain look in his eye when he watched her. It was like respect, almost admiration, but it would change so often to resentment that Toby could never be sure if what he'd seen in the barber's face was real. The clues were all about Mr. Todd. The intense, intimidating, often monosyllabic Mr. Todd - a man who stalked about upstairs and came down only rarely, who seemed as if human contact was something foreign to him... As if he couldn't quite fathom that Toby was a child, or what a child really was. As if, somehow, Toby made the barber uncomfortable.
And the smell! Sometimes, when the wind blew right, Toby could smell the smoke that came from the oven fire downstairs. He knew what a bone mill smelled like, his work house had been right across from one. That smell was terribly similar to the smell of charring bone and flesh. Sickly, almost sweet in a way, with a taste on the air that left you both hungry and gagging at the same time. Reason would say that Mrs. Lovett just bought a whole side or half-side, carved the meat up herself, and threw the bones into the fire rather than cart them upstairs to send them off to the mill or chuck them into the sewers. Reason would say that, but Toby also reasoned that he'd never seen Mrs. Lovett buying meat. He'd never seen meat being delivered either.
He only saw two customers in three actually leave Mr. Todd's barber shop upstairs.
Toby was starting to get awfully worried.
"Try this."
That voice was Mrs. Lovett's, and Toby peeked around the banister just enough to see her standing by the small wood stove, holding a wooden spoon in one hand, her other cupped beneath it to catch any drops that might fall from it. She turned slowly, careful not to let whatever was in the spoon drip onto the floor, and offered the spoon to Mr. Todd.
Mr. Todd was standing there by the table, staring off into space as he idly fingered the stained cuffs of his white shirt. They were stained to a brownish colour, Toby saw, you'd never notice the change if you didn't see him with his jacket off.
He responded to Mrs. Lovett waving the spoon under his nose only slowly, and with a grunt that might have been a question.
"Oh, dont worry dear," Mrs. Lovett replied, acting as if he'd really spoken instead of just made a vague noise, "it's just a little experiment of mine for a new sauce. There aint any meat in it."
That didn't strike Toby as particularly odd. Mr. Todd never ate red meat. Whenever it was put before him he gained a certain look on his face, one where his lip curled a little in disgust and you could see his nostrils flaring. The few times that had happened Mrs. Lovett had made a joke about it. Not to his taste, she said, he was waiting for something grander.
Mr. Todd regarded the spoon beneath his nose with a similar look, lip curling a little at the corner. He looked as if he was going to protest, even just to turn away and refuse her in silence. Then, just when Toby thought that he would surely push the spoon away, Mr. Todd seemed to give in.
The barber leaned forward just enough to take a tiny bit of the sauce from the very tip of Mrs. Lovett's wooden spoon. He turned away then, Toby couldn't see his face when he spoke, the barber's voice unusually gruff even for him; "It's very good."
"You see!" Mrs. Lovett was just as cheerful as ever, but somehow her optimistic facade seemed just a little bit off, "I told you them new spices would make a real difference."
Mr. Todd stiffened, going suddenly rigid. "Get out."
Mrs. Lovett reeled back as if burned. He couldn't see it, but surely he could hear the click of her shoes against the wooden flooring. "But... Mr. T!" Mrs. Lovett gasped, dropping her spoon on the table top regardless of the sauce (rust red, Toby noted, the sauce was like thick, old blood). "Get out of me own kitchen?"
"Get out," Mr. Todd repeated, his hand performing some kind of twitch that brought it close to that stange holster on his belt that he kept his razors in. His voice was so cold it would have frozen a lake in summer.
Mrs. Lovett didn't so much as pause to take her big pot of sauce off the stove. She fled into the parlour so fast that she didn't even notice Toby sitting on the stair nearby. Mr. Todd didn't notice the presence of their small guest either; Not when he stood there, staring out the window as the pot bubbled, not when he started pacing back and forth in front of the table, muttering to himself. Toby knew it was stupid and as like to get him kicked out on his ear as it was to get any information, but he leaned forward just the same, trying to catch what Mr. Todd was saying to himself.
"Just like hers," he was saying, repeating the words over and over, interspersed with the word 'why' and frustrated sounds ripped from the back of his throat.
It took Toby a while to realise that he was talking about the sauce. Just like who's? He was so caught up in wondering who Mr. Todd could be referring to that he almost missed it when the words changed. The words changed but Toby didn't have time to sort them out into a proper meaning, because Mr. Todd had taken hold of the big, bubbling pot - seemingly oblivious to how the metal must burn - and thrown it across the room. Sauce splattered everywhere, drenching the walls, the floor, the table, and Mr. Todd himself in that thick, glutinous, rust red sauce.
Toby bolted back up the stairs and to the rear of the building that he now called home. Only once he'd thrown himself into his small bedroom, which was more like a sewing room that had a ricketty old bed shoved into the middle, did he remember what Mr. Todd had said before he'd thrown the pot.
"She did it. It was her."
Just another clue to the puzzle. Toby would figure it out in the end even if it killed him to do so.
Lucy could not cook. She could make jam and preserves, but she was utterly hopeless when left alone with savoury goods and an oven. Her family was of good enough standing that nobody had mourned her ability to burn salads, it had always been expected that she would marry well and have a household staff to do all of her cooking for her. Of course, nothing in this life ever goes quite how you think it will.
Almost the exact day that the future Lucy Barker turned fifteen her father discovered that his business partner had signed on a bad deal. All of their assets, all of their money, was suddenly gone. The big manor house was sold, along with almost everything with it. Lucy's fifteenth birthday present was a small room in a small house in the city. Suddenly cooking was important again.
Lucy improved only enough that her meals were passable. They were edible, but never something anyone particularly looked forward to. Without a maid to clean the house or a nanny to look after the younger children, Lucy was given a crash course in childcare and basic cleaning. Her mother, a fair hand at sewing, found work as a seamstress, her father took several steps down in the world to work as a banker.
Lucy met the love of her life at sixteen. It was when Benjamin Barker was courting her that she met the baker who owned and leased the shop upstairs, and his young wife. Mrs. Lovett - Nellie, back then - was a bright eyed, dark haired little thing who ruled her kitchen with a wooden spoon and a smile. Sensing an opportunity and not wanting to disappoint her future husband, Lucy first asked Mrs. Lovett to teach her how to cook.
The venture was a marvellous failure that left smoke stains on the wall and ceiling in glorious swirling, sooty patterns.
"It's hopeless!" Lucy cried, throwing her small, pale hands up in frustration. "I curdle milk just by looking at it! I make lettuce wilt! If I so much as touch the sauce it goes lumpy!"
The young Mrs. Lovett clucked her tongue. She had been deathly jealous of Lucy when she first discovered what the young woman was to Mr. Barker upstairs... Now she was still jealous, but she couldn't hate a woman who was both sugar-sweet and terrible at almost every household chore that mattered. The woman cleaned well and knew her way around a nursery, but laundry, cooking, and other housekeeping chores were beyond her, poor thing.
"It's not so bad, dear," Nellie tried to comfort the younger girl by patting her shoulder gently, "so you're not made for the kitchen, your Mr. Barker loved you before he tasted your cooking and I'm sure he'll feel the same afterwards."
"I'm hopeless," Lucy reiterated with a sigh, though she gave Mrs. Lovett a little smile. Suddenly something seemed to occur to her. "Mrs. Lovett," Lucy began breathlessly, her sudden excitement more than obvious as she clutched at Nellie's hand with her own, "I can cook well enough that Benjamin wont starve, but I can't do anything fancy. You are the best cook I've ever met! Surely you could come up with something, some sauces perhaps, that I can reheat and serve with my cooking! It's bound to taste so much better." Seeing Mrs. Lovett's reluctance, Lucy was quick to add on to her suggestion; "I could pay you of course, not much, perhaps a few shillings a week...?"
Mrs. Lovett thought of the beautiful Benjamin Barker who kept shop upstairs suffering through Lucy's terrible cooking. She imagined a perfect marriage, the only fly in the ointment the horrible, burnt or bland meals that Mr. Barker came home to every night. A man like that deserved the happiness in this life that he could get. She smiled, squeezing Lucy's hands in reassurance. "Of course I will, dear. How could I say no to a face like that?"
Lucy thought that Mrs. Lovett meant her face, with her sincerity and hope. Lucy was perhaps not the most perceptive young woman in the world.
No glossary this time 'round, but just in case anyone needs to google the words "bone mill", I mean the kind that converts animal bones into fertilizer or other products, not the medical kind.