We Could Get By

xxi.

Nellie dreamed often. Sometimes, their house caught fire. Not the house they had now, cute and squat and blue with its charming off-white trim, but the Fleet Street house. The flames always came crawling out of the oven in the bakehouse, dragging themselves on greedy hands, and climbed the beams and rafters and swallowed up the furniture. Always, she would be watching from the street, even though she could somehow see past the brick and the skeleton of the building and into the rooms. The house was doomed. The orange and red tongues of fire licked up the tall, looming specter of the house until it was nothing but flickering, dancing flames. St. Dunstan's clock would fill the smokey silence and shake the ground beneath her feet with the tolling weight of its announcement of the new hour. Sometimes, Sweeney was there. Other times he was absent, and she was left to watch her entire life turn to ashes.

When she awoke, it was very seldom that she felt sad. A sense of relief usually hung about her, even as she struggled to pull herself from the dream and back into the waking world. When that house went up in smoke, the ghosts trapped there went with it, curling towards the dark clouds in wispy tendrils. Only a house, she would say to herself quietly. Only a house. She had a home now, good and proper and almost everything she'd ever hoped. Nellie was convinced that if they ever went back, the house would be nothing more than a patch of empty street, a grim wasteland where no one could quite recall what had stood there before. Those London walls had seen too much; it was better off as a heap of rubble.

Sweeney had gotten angry over supper once, in the dim wallpapered Fleet Street parlor. He had never laid a hand on her; Nellie knew he never would, but he had slammed the silver serving spoon down hard onto the table, rattling the bowls and the polished silverware as if the world might be coming to an end and he was powerless to stop it.

She had said, gently, "Don't cha think maybe ya ought to give it a rest for a bit, love? The judge-"

That was when something already wearing thin inside him snapped, loudly, and he had stood abruptly from his seat. He loomed over the table as angular and gaunt as the armature for some frightening sculpture never quite completed. The chair had fallen to the ground, but louder than that was the hard ball of his fist connecting with the table. He had called her a "bloody wretched woman", voice like a knife, shouting with enough force that it looked as if the vein beneath the pale skin of his forehead might burst. He had stalked off to his shop after that and returned during the night as placid as she had ever seen him, smoothed over and composed like the ocean after a hurricane had come barreling through. He did not notice the tear tracks that streaked Nellie's cheeks. At least, he pretended very well not to see them.

Nellie wondered if he remembered that. If he did, he surely would not recall it with the vivid clarity that she certainly possessed. Yet it had been so difficult, even then, to be so afraid of him.

It had not all been bad on Fleet Street. For every handful of dark memories, there were a few good ones to be found amongst the ash, glittering and tiny and golden like the trim of a locket or a gilt photograph frame.

Some nights, they would sit down and play cards. Sweeney would come skulking into the kitchen with the deck in his hands, and Mrs. Lovett would stop what she was doing and make room for him to perch carefully across from her. Nellie liked playing cards just fine, but she did not quite like playing against Sweeney. He absolutely had to win, and usually, he did by sheer fierceness alone (and a fair bit of cheating that he denied when Nellie called him out on it). She was not particularly fond of playing cards with Toby, either, who had taken to letting her win even when she told him not to. Toby would go along with performing skits with her, though, acting out scenes from plays and books and dancing her clumsily across the living room for their unimpressed audience of one. She had tried to sweep Sweeney into a silly waltz once, in the cluttered little London living room, but he had refused.