Razors & Ruin (Rare Horrors #1)

Chapter 1

1

Sweeney

I fucking hate London. But in all the wide world, where else is there to go?

Only here could a man like me blend in. I stood out in the new world, but now I can finally breathe. Home and walking through the fetid smog of England’s glorious capital.

Ten years . Ten whole years I spent at His Majesty’s pleasure, laboring under the baking sun. The dark never felt better, but I’ve got nothing.

The satchel over my shoulder contains my paperwork and a few scraps of bread. My parole officer instructed me to report to the workhouse for homing and employment, and I said the right things, but that place won’t see me again.

Before I left, I hid my silver razors where no one would ever find them, tucked away in the room above the moneylender’s place in Fleet Street. The magistrates seized all my belongings, but I never listed the razors in the inventory, so they weren’t missed.

If they are still there, I’ll be set. I could sell one and use the proceeds as a downpayment on lodgings.

Fleet Street is the same gray avenue of misery it always was. The rookeries are more crowded and the miasma thicker, but as ever, the poor crawl beneath the feet of the rich, who don’t look to see the suffering at their heels.

The money lenders are no longer resident here. Instead, a faded sign bears the legend: ‘Mrs Lovett’s Meat Pies.’ A board outside says, ‘Traditional fare. Delighted to serve you.’

I peer through the grimy glass. A woman stands at a counter, swiping her pastry brush over a row of ready-to-bake pies. She dips into her egg wash and starts on the second row, pausing to pick out a piece of eggshell.

She will have the key to the upstairs room.

I push the door, setting the bell jangling. The woman looks up, and as her eyes meet mine, she drops her brush onto the dirty floor.

“Mr. Brook?” she says, her voice almost a whisper. “It can’t be.”

I recognize her now. Her cheeks are hollow, but the years have done little to dim her beauty. Of all the people in this city, how is it that she’s the first one I meet?

“Well, I’ll be.” I walk toward her and sit on a stool beside the counter. “Could it be my Nellie?”

She flushes and wipes her hands on her apron. “I never—I mean, this is unexpected.” She pulls off her mob cap and fusses with her hair, pushing it off her face. “Did they pardon you?”

“Sort of, treacle.” I smile. “Good behavior, if you can believe that.”

“Not for a minute.” She giggles, then composes herself. “Goodness. I’m so silly. Hold on a minute, love.”

She darts out of the room through a back door, and I look around. A velvet portrait on the far wall stares back at me; a man with a receding hairline and a severe, puritanical outfit.

Otherwise, the shop is nothing special, but it’s not exactly a high-end establishment. I lift a muslin to reveal freshly baked pies and inspect one as Nellie walks back in.

“Here,” she says, thrusting a tumbler into my hand. “I know gin isn’t as popular as it was, but I like it. Gets me through the day. And if I have enough, I don’t have to worry about what goes in these.” She gestures at the pies. “They aren’t exactly fit for a king.”

“I’m not a king, though, am I?”

I shrug and take a bite. The problem is immediately apparent, and even then, she understates the extent of it. There isn’t enough gin to wash that taste away in the bloody world.

“Now, I did warn you, Mr. Brook,” Nellie says as I knock back the alcohol. “I was married to a butcher. I know what good meat looks like, and I ain’t seen it in years.”

“This,” she turns a spoon in a bowl of greenish-gray matter, “is ground-up dead stuff scraped off carriage wheels, a bit of bread, and maybe some beef, although you’d have to use your imagination to taste it. I sometimes take a turn sweeping the decks of the ships from India; that way, I get to keep what’s in the pan, and there are spices in between the mouse shit.”

“You said you were married. Past tense.” I point to the painting. “Is that your husband?”

“Poor Harry,” she says, sipping her drink. “When he got sick with the gout, I agreed to care for him, but only if he’d marry me. The dirty old bugger was thrilled until I said I’d be sleeping on the couch. Three years since the angels took him.”

“I hope Heaven showed him mercy.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’d have taken every saint and seraphim to carry him up there. He was as wide as he was tall by the end.”

“Nellie.” I lean closer, and she goes still. “Who has the room upstairs?”

“No one’s lived there since it was yours, Mr. Brook.”

I take her hand, drawing circles on the back with my fingertip. Her arms are covered in fine scars, barely the width of a hair, criss-crossing up toward her shoulders.

I turn her wrist gently and squint at a particular arrangement of lines on her inner arm. The marks are faded, but I make out a word: Currer.

I tap the DIY tattoo. “That’s not my name anymore, treacle. You can call me Sweeney. Sweeney Todd.”

Nellie licks her lips. “I like it.”

A decade and a marriage later, this needy little slut is as desperate for me as she was the day she visited me in prison and took my load on her face. What a fantastic stroke of luck.

If I play her right, she could make my life far more straightforward than anticipated.

“So you don’t have a lodger,” I murmur. “As it happens, I require a room. Would you be so kind as to show me around?”