Haunted

Chapter Six

When all three of the bodies had been cleaned and dumped into the meat grinder, Sweeney ground out some meat and then started back upstairs. The morning quickly gave way to afternoon, and his freshly bloodied clothes glowed in the late light. "Mrs. Lovett?" he called when he didn't see her in the shop.

"I'm gettin' the blood off the wall, love, give me a minute!" She had made it into her room. He looked around the room to inspect, but she had found the proper place for everything once again, all the blood mopped up from the floor. Gradually following her voice, he watched her scrub at the wall, sprawled out with the low-necked dress, her bosom straining against it. She scrubbed too intently, at first, to notice, but then she glanced up at him. "M' eyes is up here," she mumbled, hardly looking at him until the stain on the wall had dissipated enough for her to consider satisfactory. "Good lord, I'm starving. You look rough. I'll put on some potatoes. You've gotta change your shirt before somebody comes by—gonna try to open for dinner—gonna have to roll out some more crusts—gonna have to get the pies a'bakin'." She ran her hands through her tousled amber hair.

He wanted to put his hands in it, too. "Of course." He was not hungry. He did not often feel hunger. He did not often feel anything except what he felt for her.

And he felt many things for her, especially with her pressure to attend the ball. But with what had become of Lucy, he didn't want to let her go, even if he was with her. He didn't consider himself perfect protection. If it came to a brawl, he would certainly fork the beadle on his razor, and then he'd be hanged; murder was not a transportable crime. And then Mrs. Lovett would have to fend for herself in a cruel world that had, before his arrival, left her hardly able to provide for herself. "I'll change my shirt, then."

"Bring this one back down. I need to wash clothes soon, after I get the pies in the oven." She toyed with the lock of hair that kept springing from behind her ear. "Oye, so many things to do." One hand rubbed at the bruise on her neck, and she grimaced when she touched it. "Not enough time." Her eyes moved to his, and he gravitated closer to her. "I'm glad that, in your lying world, you'd take me to the coast for Christmas."

He snorted. "Always takes a fantasy to satisfy a lady." He desperately wanted to tuck the lock behind her ear, but he strode past her up the stairs to his closed shop like a blitz so that no one would see his stained shirt, and he changed it and balled the dirty one up. His nipples pricked at the chill of the room against him for the moment he was bare, but the second one quickly warmed him.

Then he examined his razors. Mrs. Lovett needed to learn to defend herself. Perhaps he could teach her. Not to slit throats, no. But how to use a weapon, and how to keep one near her at all times so she had something more than a woman's feeble strength and her vocal cords to protect herself from the vile hearts of man. "And throat slitting wouldn't harm her," he thought aloud, this time so consumed in his wondering that it didn't bother him that he spoke the words in his head.

But his lonely shop did not speak to him, so he started back down the stairs and into her shop to find her rolling out dough. "Do you want something to drink?" He shook his head, and she went back to rolling. "We need to get something about the cockroaches and the rats. Wish I could afford traps. Haven't much liked poisons recently." Since Lucy, he mentally substituted as he watched her face contort, skimming over the situation she knew he preferred to avoid. "But these roaches, they'll be the death of me, provided the rats don't give us the damn plague—"

"Mrs. Lovett?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Yes, dear?" She paused in her rolling as he took out one of his razors. When she looked at his razors, her eyes always gleamed with some greed and admiration and a hint of excited fear, like the prospect of the blade against her neck both astounded and tormented her. "Don't you be cutting your fingers with that, now," she whispered, voice smooth on the light air.