Caught Somewhere in Time

True Love Never Ends

"For sale"

The sign on the door of the pie shop was loud and clear. Eleanor was selling her business. Or someone else was on her behalf. The possibility chilled him to the bones.

Four days had he spent desperately searching for her with no luck. It was as if the earth had swallowed her up.

As soon as Sweeney made sure Lucy was alright, he made his way back downstairs, with the excuse that on his walk he'd found a patron who urgently needed a shave. But the woman who actually needed him with urgency was nowhere to be seen. In her room, there were only the blood-stained bedsheets.

Like a bat out of hell, he ran to the streets. Never one to sit idle, he assumed she'd gone to see a doctor by herself instead of waiting for him. He first paid a visit to Doctor Higgins, but he hadn't seen Nellie that day. His visits to the other doctors in the area yielded the same results. Next were the hospitals, over the next couple of days he visited as many as he could, even venturing into Whitechapel's own London Hospital. But in the midst of another bout of the never-ending cholera epidemic that had been ravaging the city for almost a decade, chaos was rampant in the receptions and waiting rooms and no one could confirm nor deny that they've seen a pregnant woman matching Nellie's description. They could nonetheless inform him that there was no patient under the name of Eleanor Lovett currently receiving treatment.

That did nothing to assuage him. It she wasn't in a hospital... he struggled to see any scenario in which a heavily pregnant woman who was bleeding the last time he saw her would be fine after not being seen for days. What if on her way to get medical help she was run over by a carriage? What if she just fainted due to a massive blood loss, leaving her at mercy of all the beggars, the urchins and all the vermin in London who would gladly do everything to her, from stealing all she had to killing her to sell her organs and those of their baby? Perhaps it was time to get the police involved, though he wasn't fond of those self-serving coppers who bent over backwards to protect the rich and privileged. Speaking of the rich... what if the Judge got to her and punished her for not getting that abortion when he gave her the chance?

Or that Bouverie street looney, Mrs. Mooney... she never liked that Nellie was going to give birth to what she thought was Albert's heir, what if she hurt her? Those two possibilities were slightly more comforting than just thinking she might be in the morgue or rotting in a filthy alley, so he paid a visit to the demented pie maker first. Yet inside Mrs. Mooney's house of horrors, which he forcefully entered despite the older woman's protests and her threats to have her herd of cats attack him (all named a variation of Albert or Bertie, it seemed), he didn't find what he was looking for. As disturbing as some of her furniture and mementos were—he was particularly perplexed by a shrine to Albert Lovett in the middle of her bedroom—there was no sign that she could have held her rival captive. Not even in the bakehouse, though there he saw some rotting cat corpses suspiciously close to the mincer. Perhaps she'd decided to heed Nellie's suggestion and use pussy meat instead of whatever she used before.

He left Mrs. Mooney's pie shop with empty hands and returned home to check on Lucy before he went back to his search. His next stop would be the Judge's manor and if he found out he had anything to do with Nellie's disappearance, he would not hesitate to deploy his silver friends, no matter the consequences. Yet as soon as he rounded the corner, he saw the big sign advertising the sale of Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pie Emporium.

With his heart in his mouth, he wasted no time in entering the premises. If something had happened to Nellie and it was some long-lost relative selling the shop in her absence, he needed to know. Though what he'd do if that were the case, he didn't know, his anxious mind did not allow him to see past that moment that could determine everything.