A/n: Sorry I haven't updated for a while. Let's just say this chapter isn't going to be too pleasant for one of the less cherished characters.
To Trixie-firecracker: don't worry, Sweeney doesn't think of the beggar woman that way. If he did he'd have to be pretty desperate =D
~Severed~
"Got a present, sweetie-pie, got present for you sweet."
"Go away." The barber shook the beggar woman off him, as if her gnarled hands were no more than the fog curling around them.
The streets were not bare.
The rain smoked and steamed against the pavement. Black umbrellas marched to the tune of the mirthless sky.
A funeral carriage clattered over the cobblestones. The white horses snorted and shook the black plumes whirling about their heads.
It could not have been a bleaker day had Sweeney gotten down on his knees and begged for it. He turned – he'd walked the length of the street and saw the grey-stained beggar was still on the corner, playing in the mud.
The funeral procession did not startle her. "Horse!" she shrieked, getting to her knees and pointing at the animals.
The festering skin, straggly hair, withered eyes – all of it was once Lucy's. He was clinging to less than a memory. The ghost of the ghost of his perished wife. He clutched the purse of coins in his pocket under the grey shadows of sickly sun. He could see the bare white ring of flesh where his wedding ring used to sit. He had lost it all. No photographs, no lock of hair, no ring. Benjamin Barker's life was now erased.
Even back on the island, when he had spent days staring through the brick-sized window in his cell, the faint glimmer of his ring was there to comfort him. The weight of it trapped his flesh over years of carrying and laying the sandstone bricks of the prison walls. The calluses grew thick, blisters burst and skin peeled. His flesh grew pale and thick around his fingers. But the ring would not give itself up.
And neither, it seemed, would the beggar woman.
"Stop that." Sweeney tugged his sleeve away from her desperate lips. She was sucking on the frayed edges like a child.
"Eat, sweetie."
A plump, dead pigeon was dangled before his face.
Its blank eyes stared beyond him. Its beak was open, and he thought immediately of Mrs Lovett's mouth gaping at him as he hurled her toward the flames.
There was no need to make a scene.
He shook her hands until she was forced to drop the filthy creature, and marched her down the laneway that led to their secluded apartment.
"Up!" he commanded her, and up the beggar woman went, gargling happily and kicking her skirts over the steps.
When they were safely ensconced within, he sat the addled woman down by the kitchen table, tying her hands and feet together with bits of torn bed sheets to prevent her from tearing around the place and trying to dangle herself out of the window.
"Sweetie!" She was whining at him pitifully, but the barber ignored it.
He was contemplating the letter on the table. It was barely a letter. He wondered if the baker would come. If she came, would she come out of curiosity, at least? Perhaps she wanted him dead. He was running a great risk. If anyone else but Mrs Lovett turned up, his plans would be ruined. That was why he needed the beggar woman, for now. She useful while ever they believed she was a harmless beggar woman unattached and alone. Who would imagine she was shackled to a demon such as Todd?
Sweeney pocketed the letter. He did not want to ponder it anymore. He had done the damage. It could not be undone. Mrs Lovett chose to be with the Judge of her own volition. Lucy would not have accepted her fate so placidly. She would not have consented to the Judge so easily. She would have –
Sweeney checked himself. He would never have thrown his wife into an oven, once upon a time.
Down on the streets, the clatter and crowd had slowly transformed. The ease and bright and bustle of workers and women shopping with their male escorts and children playing skittles outside shopfronts had died. Now London's true form opened up. Poor men, pick-pockets, prostitutes and the like came and went as the night burned on. The faces grew drearier, drawn and fierce. A stocky man jostling through a group of prostitutes caught his attention.
His stringy blonde hair stood out amongst the drab suits and dresses. He carried his cane beneath his arm, ducked his head and grasped his hat with the other arm.
Beadle Bamford himself, huffing and puffing like an overstuffed Christmas turkey with its crest cut off.
Sweeney's eyes followed him as if a watchman from a tower. He left the beggar woman crying at the table and dashed out the door. Such an opportunity only came once.
* * *
They agreed to meet in the library.
It was the one place where she did not feel so much a prisoner.
Nellie was a great reader. She had never much money for books, of course, but she knew enough friends off whom she could borrow enough books to fill a ship wreck. She still remembered the first book Benjamin Barker had loaned her. Evelina. It was Lucy's book, but that was hardly the point.
"Feeling better, I hope?" The Judge stood on the threshold, as if he were afraid she might collapse in her wheelchair if he took another step.
"I ain't a bird, Turpin."
"You are not a man, either," he began, "you should not have to endure –"
She cut him off. "Being imprisoned? No wonder your poor little ward went mad."
He looked at her sharply. "We will not discuss such things."
Nellie wheeled herself toward the book shelves. "Wot you wanna discuss then, Lord S? This?"
She picked up a red book trimmed with gold binding, flicking through the pages with deliberate leisure.
He came forward. "They are not for a lady's eyes," he said, attempting to snatch it from her. He noticed the baker was wrapped in heavy shawls. To hide the wounds seeping, probably...
She wheeled out of his reach. It pained her to move at all, but she could't have him knowin' that. Give him a moment of Lucy-weakness an' he'd pounce on her. She knew. "But you'll try those things on me?" She gave him a cutting look. "Not far from the truth, is I Lord S?"
The Judge lost some of the colour in his face. "If this is about the Beadle's behaviour towards you…"
"I don't give a rat's about 'im!"
"Then what?"
She wheeled the chair directly in front of him. It was beyond clear from the way she looked at him that she was not afraid. He was not adept at reading the faces of the fairer sex. But there was something else in her expression, something close to –
"I wanna know about Lucy."
His eyes darted to the open pages on her lap. A man was kneeling before a woman –
He closed his eyes. "Know that I did not intend to hurt her."
"That's all very well," Mrs Lovett went on, shutting up the book.
"You were there when I took the child, he said quietly. "you know."
"Why d'you think I can't trust ya?"
"Very well." The Judge looked at his shelves. Anything to avoid her scrutiny. "I loved her," he said after a time. "She was…innocent. There are not many of that sort left in London."
Mrs Lovett nodded, though she was inclined to swap the word "innocent" with "simple."
"…I had to have her….by consent, or by other means."
"As simple as that?" She drummed her fingers on the corners of the book.
"As simple as that," he admitted.
She was tugging on one of her curls now. On the side of her head that had grown back hair. "Permission ter speak candid-like?"
"You will anyway," scoffed Turpin, remembering the recent candle attack.
"Unless you 'ave lingered by an empty fireplace for fifteen ears, mournin' the fate of the man who don't even remember you when 'e comes back…an' continues ter love a ghost, an' not the one who cleans 'is shirts an' cooks 'is food an' cleans up 'is murders…then you've no idea wot it means to love."
"He threw you into the oven," Turpin reminded her.
"Let me ask you this, Lord S," she went on, "do you still think o' Lucy? D'you wish you could 'old her, sit wif her, 'ear the sound o' her voice?"
He did not answer her. His eyes pulled reluctantly from the shelves, and rested on her expectant gaze. "And you?"
"Wot about me?" He was watching her strangely. His face remained blank…but the eyes roved.
"Do you…still wish to do those things with Todd?"
"'Course not," she said quickly, handing him back his book and wheeling out of the room.
* * *
"Mr Fogg doesn't take men's hair. Too coarse."
The Beadle stuck a fraying shoe in the entrance to the asylum. "In my case, sir, you will make an exception. Order of the great Judge Turpin, you see," he said forcefully, prodding the scraggy man with the butt of the cane. Even in his lowest state of humiliation, the Beadle sought pleasure in squishing those lower than him. It came naturally to him, as it was natural that a woman such as Mrs Lovett would prostitute herself to the next man who provided her sanctuary. In this case the Judge.
"My hair, you will find, is as delicate as any gentlewoman's." The beadle gave his hair a decided flick. It was his prize possession, apart from his cane.
"Very well then. S'pose none'll notice. Sit down quick, I've got me pretties to see to." Fogg darted his eyes toward the locked cages with the brunettes, blondes, and redheads. He drew out an engraved pair of scissors, and in several swift snips had seized the blond stringy tufts in his hands, and left the Beadle ragged and bald. "Done."
He placed the money in the Beadle's coin purse.
Despite himself, Bamford smiled. He would grow his hair back easily. In the meantime, he had two objectives: first, to find the most expensive den in all of London, and blow his wig money on coke; second, to avenge himself against Mrs Lovett and her wheedling craft and seduction. The Judge might adore her now, but the Beadle knew his master well enough to know that it would not last. She would fall from favour, and when that day came, the Beadle would be there to help her into hell.
* * *
He began jostling the crowd with his cane; eager to find the den that would satisfy his hunger.
He did not know he was being followed until the last moment. The Beadle was an edgy man. But he was not cautious.
"Pleasant evening, sir," came a voice behind him.
"Yes, it is," said the Beadle, rubbing his stomach affectionately as he turned.
"But not for long," rejoined the man.
The second the tall figure stepped out of the laneway shadows – it began.
The Beadle knew he was going to lose more than hair that hour. Drained skin, hollow eyes, devil smile. The demon barber. Sweeney Todd. The glistening blades were drawn out of pockets. Bamford stared at them, mesmerised. "Kill me, sir, and every man in London will swarm upon you."
"Why would I kill you?" Todd pressed one of his razors swiftly against the Beadle's pasty throat. "You are no use to me dead."
He was backed against the wall. A glimmer of hope punctuated the Beadle's face. "Then what?"
He soon found out.
Todd flipped his victim's arm against the wall. In one slow, measured slice across the flesh and into the brick work, they were gone.
The Beadle watched them slide away from his hand like fat white worms. He could not scream. His eyes and mouth were gouged against the surface of the brick.
"Three days, Bamford," warned the barber, stepping over the three severed fingers twitching on the ground. "That's how long the Judge has to set her free."
The beadle jammed his hand in his vest pocket. Blood welled up inside the fabric. He made a fist with his other hand, and pressed it against the wall. "Your wife is dead," he managed to splutter.
"I mean Mrs Lovett, fool," said Todd, fleeing down to the end of the lane. "Release her."
The moment the villain had rounded the corner, Bamford stumbled back out onto the main road. He pulled his hand up to the lamp light, and let out a voiceless cry.
The crowd moved around him.
They saw the stumpy hand, and powered on. The man owed drug debts, or had harmed himself. There were enough mad people on the streets near Fogg's asylum, and most weren't locked up.
"Help me," the Beadle gasped eventually. "I am a Beadle."
When this sentenced elicited no greater sympathy from the crowd, he called out, "Judge Turpin will greatly reward whoever helps me."
A few men and women then recognised him as the Judge's servant and went to his aid.
"The demon barber is at large!" he blurted to his rescuers, before fainting dead away.
* * *