Chapter Text
To seek revenge will lead to hell / But everyone does it, if seldom as well / As Sweeney / As Sweeney Todd / The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
____________
Toby didn't see it. But he heard everything.
He managed to find his way back to the sewer grate he'd gone down. He was still covered in sweat and shaking head to toe. But upstairs he heard voices, floating down through the grate. So he hid behind a brick column and waited. He heard Mrs. Lovett screaming.
"Die! God in Heaven, why won't you die?" Running footsteps, the muffled sounds of talking. Something heavy dragging across the floor. The grate lid opened with a scrape and Toby heard the splash. Peeking around the corner, he saw a load of blood pouring down. He hid again, holding back another upchucking with one hand. Now the grate was open he could hear better.
"No, don't touch her!" Mrs. Lovett's command was hurried, scared-sounding. Mr. Todd's gruff voice answered.
"What's the matter with you? It's only a crazed old beggar woman." Toby's mind spun. When did they kill the beggar woman?
He didn't have much time to wonder. Todd gave a cry of surprise, and then another one of sheer horror. "Oh, my God!" There was a long, long pause, broken only by the sound of cloth rustling. " 'Don't I know you,' she said!" Todd shouted. "You knew! You knew all along that my Lucy lived!"
"I was only thinking of you!" Mrs. Lovett said. Toby could hear Mr. Todd crying now, saying the name Lucy over and over. Then Mrs. Lovett screamed, angrier than Toby had ever heard her, "Your Lucy! A mad old hag picking bones and rotten spuds out of ashcans! Wandering round London covered in her own shit! Would you have wanted to know that was all was left of her?"
"You lied to me." Todd's voice was suddenly low and dangerous. Through her bluffing, Mrs. Lovett's voice shook.
"No, no, not lied at all - I said she took the poison, she did! I never said that she died!"
"Lucy, Lucy, I came home only for this..."
"She lived, but it left her weak in the head, all she did for months was just lie there in bed, poor thing - " Mrs. Lovett was ranting now, tears in her voice. "She should've been in hospital, wound up in Bedlam instead!"
"You lied, you lied - "
"Better you should think she was dead!" she shrieked. "All right, I lied, 'cause I love you! I'd be twice the wife she was, I love you - that thing could never care for you like me!"
Even in his terror, Toby thought, High time you said it.
____________
Another pause. Only Mrs. Lovett's sobbing filled the air. When Todd finally spoke again, it was like a different man. Calm, cool, and level-headed. "Mrs. Lovett, you're a bloody wonder. Eminently practical, yet appropriate as always."
Toby could hear him standing up, and her backing away. "D'you mean it?" she gasped. "I swear, I thought it only for the best - "
"Come here, my love. Nothing to fear. As you've said repeatedly, there's little point in dwelling on the past."
"Can we still be...married?"
Toby could almost see the barber's mad smile. "What's dead is dead. Life is to learn forgiveness and try to forget, my pet."
Toby heard rhythmic footsteps, two of them. Were they...dancing? Mrs. Lovett's voice broke above the barber's again, frantic yet happy. "By the sea, all comfy and cozy, right, Mr. Todd?"
"Life is for the alive, my dear, so let's keep living it!" Todd shouted it as the footsteps bounced across the bakehouse floor -
Toby would never forget the scream. A scream of unbearable pain, agony and disbelief and fury, with a roar of oven flames. That smell like roasted pig as the screams went on and on. At last, after what seemed like an age, he heard the slam of the iron oven door.
____________
Toby's mind was a blank now. Everything was quiet. Todd upstairs. He had to see. Slowly, he hoisted himself up through the open sewer grate.
Three dead bodies. One, Judge Turpin. A deep razor hole in his throat. Two, Beadle Bamford. He'd crashed down here earlier. Three, the old beggar woman, Lucy. A neat, straight razor cut slashed across her throat like a red ribbon. Todd knelt among them, holding Lucy silently. Toby knew a fourth death had happened. Smoke trailed up from the oven. Only bit of Mrs. Lovett left.
There was blood everywhere. Leaking out of throats. Dotting Todd's white shirt. Getting on Toby's shoes. Slowly he walked toward the barber. Todd glanced up at him, then back down at Lucy.
Toby felt his mouth move. "You harmed her, didn't you." Not a question. He heard himself muttering something or other. Couldn't say what. Todd didn't answer.
A shimmer. One of the razors, on the floor. Fire glinted off it. Red stains. Toby picked it up and approached Todd. As he did, the barber raised his head. He stuck out his neck.
____________
Men came to the bakehouse, led there by Anthony and a young woman in sailor’s clothes, who refused to state her name. A boy of ten or eleven was there, wearing a hand-knitted gray scarf. He squatted in the dark among the bloodied dead, holding a razor blazing scarlet in their torchlight. As unlikely as it sounded, it certainly looked as if the boy was responsible.
The admitting officials at Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”) were told that the boy, Tobias Ragg, had addressed them clearly enough when they came. He’d focused blearily on them and said, in an oddly cool voice: “You will pardon me, gentlemen, but you may not enter here. The mistress don’t let no one enter here. For you see, sirs, there’s work to be done…so much work…”
The young boy had then turned a huge meat grinder handle, watching absently as ground meat came slithering out and onto the bloodstained floor. “Three times,” he’d said. “That’s the secret. Three times through for them to be tender and juicy. Three times through the grinder… Smoothly, though…smoothly…”
He then burst into tears, and had not been able to say much of sense after that besides his name. The boy entered Bedlam muttering to himself, over and over in broken segments:
“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker man… Bake me a cake… No… No, bake me a pie to delight my eye, and I will sigh if the crust be aye…”
The boy was judged not guilty of murder based on his madness. But he was to be left in Bedlam for a minimum of twenty years. And so the world turned on, moving on without the boy, the beggar woman, the judge or the beadle, the baker or the barber. But the curling red script above the latter two's shops on Fleet Street was left behind, chipping and fading over time, but never quite losing its color. The words made sure that no one ever quite forgot.
Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pies, est. 1864: We Serve Anyone. And up the rickety wooden stairs above it, Sweeney Todd's Tonsorial Parlour.