Aren't There Butchers Enough?

i.

Mrs. Lovett knew something was coming. She had heard it on the wind that rattled the glass panes of her dusty shop windows, caught word of the inevitable from the cawing crows that settled in the bare branches of the tree in her yard. The chill of it had roosted in the hollow between her lungs.

She was not worried. She was not worried. Whether or not Sweeney was concerned, she could not tell. Her neighbor had been hunched at the booth in her shop, dark and somber as a funeral procession, for the last several hours. He swirled what remained of the whiskey he had been nursing, faint disgust hiding in the hollows of his sallow cheeks.

How must it feel to be a man condemned to death, she wondered. She had seen gruesome glimpses of the gallows they were erecting just outside of town, and it made her stomach turn far worse than the gore of the bakehouse she spent her nights in. He would be alright.

This, she knew with a fierce certainty.