A/N: Shout out to the-sadisticalovett-nutcase for predicting this chapter in her review. As always, thanks for the reviews!
~The Lesson~
There they were. Fruits as such her eyes had never seen. The bowl of cherries was the most beautiful item on the white-clothed table.
Almost wine-red, almost the colour of her curls – when she'd had them.
"Cherries, Mrs Lovett," Beadle Bamford offered, pushing the glazed bowl directly beneath her nose.
She stared at the glistening orbs, still wet from being washed. They reminded her intensely of red blood drops; the sort Mr T often had dripping from his hands or shirtfront after a particularly trying day…
"Cherries," he repeated, dispensing with all politeness. "Have some."
Poor women couldn't afford cherries.
They existed in fairy-stories, on the banquet table of a King and Queen's wedding feast, something so sweet and strange that only a demon or faerie or witch could have conjured them up. Mrs Lovett had never tasted cherries – yet she knew they were paradise's temptation. Mrs Mooney had said so. Her mother had said so. Even Mr T, she felt certain, would have shared cherries at Christmas with his wife and babe. Albert, may his soul rest in peace, never let her spend any of their savings on fruit. Awful spendthrift spent it only on cartons o' gin instead. No wonder where me god-awful habit got started…
"I know wot they is." She studied the yellow-toothed, greasy-haired man contemptuously.
It wasn't a habit of hers to be honest. Much better to lie, fewer hearts got stirred and hurt that way. Times such as these, however, Nellie felt it best to make an exception.
"Don't take this personal dear, but I can't stand the sight o' yer. If you don't mind I'll take the window seat."
"There's no decent view, I'm afraid Mrs Lovett," said the Beadle, getting to his feet. The olive green breeches did nothing to disguise the copious amounts of fat that spilled from his sides and from the bulk of his gut. The baker wrenched her gaze back to the cherry bowl just so as to avoid displaying the extent of her disgust.
He picked at the food as he went, taking his leisurely time to reach Mrs Lovett's side of the table. "Shame about the face," he sneered, evidently deriving some sort of Beadle-ish pleasure in seeing the famous flirt of Fleet Street deprived of her most enticing weapons: one of those desperately large furnace eyes. The Beadle didn't have the brains nor the sensitivity to plunder the depths of those fires, nor ponder what they meant. A cleverer man, the Judge possibly, would know what to do with them.
"Pity your mother never loved yours," Nellie returned, resting one of her sleeved hands beneath her chin and smiling wickedly. Scars couldn't strip her of her wit, nor could Mr T, she thought with a frown, thinking of the unsigned letter waiting for her upstairs under her pillow…
Beadle Bamford chuckled. He came right up close to her wheelchair. He did not tower over her, but it was unpleasant all the same, to sit so close by the Beadle's bulging stomach, rancid breath; those foul blonde strings of hair. He lowered his face by hers, those rat cold eyes smiling away as if she belonged to his private circus exhibition.
"The cherries, Mrs Lovett." The smile had gone.
"I'll pass, sir." At that moment, she did not fear him – but then what was there to fear, after all Mr Todd had done to her since?
"You don't remember, do you Mrs Lovett?"
"Whatever it wos, I'm sure it weren't worth rememberin'."
She'd never seen the Beadle without his black gloves on, and it was odd now to watch him pick up the cherry in between his thumb and forefinger, and pop it into his mouth. More than odd, she realised, as he chewed open-mouthed, letting the juice stain his vest-front. She thought for one awful moment…
"The Judge gave me special orders to see that you eat."
Nellie drummed her bare fingers on the white linen. It was much too white for her liking.
Time often passes so dull. The moments waiting for customers to pop in for a pie. Watching the dust settle on the bench. Waiting for Sweeney to surrender another body down the trap door chute. The laborious breaks in between cutting up the dead….waiting, waiting…when after all that waiting, a person's life, Mrs Lovett's life, came down to those thrifty thirty seconds waltzing with the barber toward the open furnace…
"Lord Turpin will be pleased, I'm sure," he grinned.
Bamford was not an overly agile man. Yet when it came to torture, he was more than adept.
He grasped the handful of cherries, pressing them forcibly past her slightly parted lips.
Her first instinct was to gag and spit them out. This she quickly found was impossible. The Beadle had pressed his stubby hand over her mouth, the other behind the back of her head. Immediately she understood the danger. If she turned, or moved, or threw herself violently backward – the Beadle could simply break her neck. She had no doubt he would do so.
"Chew," he said pleasurably, and the baker had no option but to obey. "I hope it's worth your remembering now, because I surely won't forget."
Nellie was too busy choking on the cherries to reply. But he knew the moment she lifted her eyes. She remembered, alright. Smiling suggestively at him. Asking him into the parlour. Pretending to undress, and at the last second clobbering him over the head with her rolling pin.
"I'm glad I can at last return the favour," he sneered, sneezing all over the rest of the cherries.
The cane came out from under the table. He placed it on the table beside the cherry bowl, and stroked it fondly. Cradling his gut with the other hand in the fashion of a pregnant woman, Beadle Bamford lifted the cane gently, and with one sharp movement snapped it outward.
The baker's eyes flicked toward it like a snake. It was steel hidden beneath that glossy wood – he had a bloomin' sword!
"Mr Bamford sir –"
He delivered the blow with a pleasurable smile.
The first cut across her neck.
The others followed, with the same sharp, switching motion as the first. He attended to the two corners of her back as if she were a donkey or a horse he was flaying, instead of a woman in a wheelchair. If Mrs Lovett had been on her feet and back to her old self she would have chased circles around the table until she'd bludgeoned him senseless with her rolling pin. But now she was white and feminine and frilly and crippled. God knows wot Lucy must 'ave felt when that grubby –
"You'll take – care, Mrs Lovett," said the Beadle as her delivered the seventh blow with great concentration, "to remember – your betters."
The wheel chair was too close to the table for her to move. She was stuck fast there, forced to keep her back upright with her face directly before his rat-like countenance.
A thin slice of chicken clung to his lip. His smile widened, and the white slither fell from his skin and moulded with the carpet. She didn't see it fall. The colourless lips were coated in brown gravy. They smelt of roast potatoes, lemon cheesecake, cinnamon and Spanish olives. The grotty texture and the mixture of smells reminded the baker of the blood that got stuck and stained on the grooves of the bakehouse floor.
"I should – also – be doing – this – for those poor gentlemen – you so thoughtfully stuffed into pies."
The Beadle lifted the switch high in the air. His gorged stomach heaved for respite.
The reprieve was worse for Nellie. There was blood oozing from her back, she knew. She gained no joy out of the white table staining red. Her eyes grew heavy as the Beadle resumed his work, cutting grooves into her skin. She'd once got the same pleasure stripping skin from flesh in the bakehouse, grinding them bones, popping the fat into the fresh crusting and searing the raw meat in the oven till it roasted well; but even on the worst days when she hated the work and wondered if she was satan's bride severing fingers and toes, there'd always been the lovely image of Benjamin Barker to cheer her in the darkness. His face had been as luminous as them angel's haloes, so young, so promisin' fresh, and his dark eyes were chocolate warm – the same as a hot tea at the end of a balmy London day.
Now the remaining cherries were dead. The red little eyeballs squashed and splattered on the white cloth. Had she done all that with her elbows? The food stunk; the meat was off, the half-devoured turkey on the far end of the table seemed to bleed out its own stuffing. It was too dark with the curtains shut, just as dark as her mildewy bakehouse had been, only there she'd had barely no candles or fancy glass chandeliers, just Albert's old oil lamp. Once Mr Todd had come bursting down there at a quarter to nine at night with his eyes blazing and scanning the room as if he'd just come from the devil's chamber itself. He'd watched her finish scraping the meat of the final victim, and disappeared upstairs without another word. She'd never thought to ask him neither.
Till this day she never knew what it could have meant.
The Beadle wiped sweat off his brow. His arm was tired and even vengeance had its limits. Pretty soon he'd have to cease and threaten the baker into keeping quiet around the Judge. His lord had only been gone a half-hour – in his current mood he would not be back so soon. But first he would have the woman cry out and plead with him for lenience. It annoyed him intensely that she gave out only spurts of stifled gasps, instead of shrieks of pain. His stomach yearned for another slice of ham, but as it was…the trollop had to learn a valuable lesson. He would not endure humiliation, and what was more, he was not to be trifled with.
"I am none too pleased, Mrs Lovett," the Beadle began maliciously, "none too please –"
"What is the meaning of this?"
"Ask – him," Mrs Lovett gasped. The blood had somehow found a way to seep inside her mouth. Her cap fell off on the floor.
Judge Turpin stood glowering in the doorway, his eyes fixed on the scene. His eyes had always held that especial hollow quality, but now there was nothing to be seen in them but the same feel of a cold wind hurtling through a poor man's alleyway.
"Come with me Beadle," was all he said.
Mrs Lovett did her best to smile through bloody teeth.
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