Thanks for the reviews!
~ Purpose~
In the manner of all brilliant cold hearted killers, Sweeney Todd had come up with an ingenious list of ways to inflict pain on Mrs Lovett.
His old partner. His confidant. And in that final month…he supposed, his friend. His only friend.
Yes, it was rare for the barber to reflect on his relationship with other people, unless it was that dark grasping past of wheeling masquerades and soft falling women and vermin Judges not worth what a pig could spit.
"Jerky, sir?" cried out a boy on the streets, barefoot and bedraggled.
"No," Sweeney rasped, stepping neatly around him and all the other beggars and misfits and no goods. His own daughter was an orphan to him – what made them think he could care for anyone else?
The Judge was his only care. Swing your light high, my friends. Swing it high. Bring the Judge to his knees. Spill his blood and smear it over windows and altars like the blood of Christ.
"How'd yer like to dab it up wiv me, sir?" A whore in a black and red ruffled dress leant against an alley wall as he stopped.
Sweeney checked his bearings. He was close now. One more black corner and he was there.
"Sir, come on now don't be cruel." The woman was following him, stroking his shoulder suggestively the way Mrs Lovett had once done. He whipped round, staring into her with the same unsparing regard a hard master gives reserves for a crippled horse before he delivers the final blow and puts the poor creature down.
"Sir?" her caked face, almost cracked, the red, dollymop lips on the verge of splitting like a burst fruit. She quivered in understanding, and her blood flowed freshly on the cobblestones. Sweeney left her body to rot face down in the alley, and set off for his final destination.
Somewhere down the lane, he could hear Mrs Lovett calling on the wind.
It was not faint. The voice whistled and wrapped itself around the soles of Sweeney's shoes.
At last the white house came in view and the barber trailed carefully the sides of its walls. He clung against the white surface until Mrs Lovett's voice was gone from his head. The only sensation left was the cold blade grasped in his pockets, and the hard back of the wall pressed against his head like the wooden bottom of a poor man's coffin. He waited until the red jackets of the guards receded into the building.
Their shift was over, and another would begin in five minutes. It didn't surprise him. Like every coward, the Judge needed armies to fight his battles
The guards' footsteps called to Sweeney as surely as a hangman trails after the weak and battered poor. He had but a moment to slip inside the Judge's house unnoticed.
Not to worry. Another silent throat slit upon the stair, and Sweeney discarded the body behind a curtain in the foyer. He slid the dead man's jacket over his shoulders like another skin. This time, he would not be foolish enough to heed a woman's advice. He would not wait. The Judge was first – Mrs Lovett he would savour last.
She too, would not escape her punishment. The barber allowed himself the briefest of smiles.
Would he dangle her head out the window, and decapitate her? Or might he pin her against the Judge's wall, and carve her crimes into the bare skin of her back? Yes, Sweeney mused delightfully, there were many ways of suffering. She would regret touching him, attempting to cast her witch's spell and have him forget his Lucy. If he touched those treacherous lips again, it would not be the prelude to a kiss, but the prelude to tearing out her tongue.
* * *
"Another slice of cold turkey, my lord?" The Beadle leaned over the laden dining table, stacking his plate as high as London tower with meat and sweets.
"No," said the Judge sourly. He was not at all accustomed to "going cold turkey," as the Beadle liked to describe his current predicament. According to Bamford, his latest obsession with Mrs Lovett was some disturbed method of abstinence. "Not that you'd need to abstain sir," the Beadle had added quickly, "since you aren't about to get pregnant."
It was true – Judge Turpin had never dealt with a sick woman. He had not expected the recovery to be so lengthy – yet what could he do?
The vision of Mrs Lovett sauntering by the stairs of the barber shop stayed within him. If he pushed the heavy meal aside and shut his eyes, it was possible to imagine her cheek caressed beneath his hand, and her smirking lips pressed against his own. He cursed himself for overlooking her then, and he cursed Mr Todd for blighting such beauty.
It was the same anger that surged within him when a beautiful woman he was smitten with chose to join a convent rather than succumb to him, or when he had lost consistently to the Beadle three times in a game of chess.
"I will have him hung," Turpin promised, scraping his chair and stalking over to the window.
"Sir?" the Beadle stared only half-interested, his mouth dripping with turkey fat.
"Sweeney Todd, you fool," said the Judge, finding he could no longer stand the heady smell of the feast. Even when he left the Beadle to his piggery and wandered down the long corridors, the drowning sensation did not ebb.
He was trapped in this house – and all the ghosts of his prison had fled. Joanna, Lucy, and now it seemed Mrs Lovett too, were keen to avoid him.
Judge Turpin held the life of almost every man in London in the palm of his hand, but he was now beginning to realise there were many things he could not do.
* * *
There was an odd flicker beneath the locked door. Someone – a woman – was singing. Very lightly. Near inaudible. Yet he heard.
There was little Sweeney did not hear. He kept his razors close and strained an ear against the door.
"Soon, if I am good," the voice half-sang, "I will dance barefoot, and batter my heart. And all them flames will blow away."
Then she began to talk. "Wouldn't you like that Albert? Me poor, dead Albert."
Mrs Lovett.
Sweeney put an eye through the key-hole. A candle illuminated the dead thing sitting in the bed. He could only see the burnt half of her – but it was her.
A poor, charred, forlorn thing. Just like his Lucy.
It had been such a satisfying idea at the time. Burning her as they used to burn witches. He had relished the torture in her face as he had flung her from her his arms and into the churning fire. Had he had time, he might have carved her body up and turned her flesh in the meat grinder and made her into a pie for all the trouble she had caused him.
And yet barely a month had passed from that night in his barber shop. When he had moulded her skin into his own, swept her mouth into his and nearly allowed her to become him…
"Mr T," the woman on the bed hissed.
Sweeney leapt back from the key-hole. The corridor was empty – he pressed his eye against the hole. She was talking to herself.
It was not quite Mrs Lovett.
The bed and blankets swamped her, and her right eye was shut and melted along with the rest of her skin. Mrs Lovett had ceased talking, and now broke into peals of laughter. Her hands remained stiff and still under the blankets, yet she would not stop breaking her mouth into cracked little smiles up at the ceiling.
Until the sound of someone coming up the stairs caused her to stir and sit frozen staring at the door.
She knew who was coming.
Sweeney found a curtain at the end of the corridor and hid himself behind it well.
The Judge had just set foot on the landing, and appeared to be mopping his eyes with a handkerchief. When he had straightened himself, sucked in his stomach, cleared his throat and ran a hand through his uncombed hair, he stopped before the baker's room.
He removed the key from his waist-pocket, and unlocked the room.
"Have you arrived at your decision, Mrs Lovett?" the barber heard the Judge asked. He stepped into the room completely, humming as he went.
From behind the curtain, Sweeney was left wondering why he had lost all desire to punish Mrs Lovett.
* * *
I'm so tired but I can't help being such a night owl. Just curious - if you are taking sides, which team are you going for? Sweenett, or Turpett? =D