Razors & Ruin (Rare Horrors #1)

Chapter 11

11

Nellie

I feel better when soaped and rouged in a fresh dress and striped frock coat. The outerwear was a present from Harry, but I never wore it anywhere. Strolling out with Mr. T feels like an occasion that warrants a little extra care.

Some things never wash off, though. I should know.

I don’t have to look far for the origins of my mile-wide nasty streak. Things happened to me that weren’t very nice in places where little girls ought not to be.

My mother reveled in making me an accessory for her zealotry. Father was nothing more than a charlatan, preaching the gospel, selling tinctures, and reading people’s head lumps, but Mama had fancier plans.

She spent her time in Christian reading-rooms, attending seances, and communing with the slain. A self-styled herself as an intermediary of perjury, taking pennies from the hands of deluded, frightened fools who only wanted to be told their dear departed infant had somehow crossed safely despite the lack of a christening.

I don’t know which of my parents I despised most. Or maybe it was their hapless quarry I hated; sheep-like ninnies with heads fogged up with idiot notions of things most of the starving poor have neither time nor luxury enough to contemplate.

Imagine harrying your heart over a dead baby when there’s no bread on the table for the ones still here to feed?

I’ll never know whether Mama found her way to the spirit plain, but God found the whole thing pretty funny. She was riven with growths by the end, and she wailed for laudanum, but Father didn’t entertain the thought for a second. He had another woman by then, and he left me to mop my dying mother's brow until I eventually called for Pastor Sommers.

Two sheets of board, a rope, and a cold hole in the ground saw her out of this life, and Father came by only to pay the pallbearers. He dropped me at the workhouse without looking back, but I didn’t even knock on the door.

Two days later, I begged for a slice of brisket from Harry Lovett. I was sixteen then; we were married five years later, just as his gammy leg started to give off a proper whiff.

I don’t know where my father is now. He never came to look for me again, and I don’t know what I’d do if I did see him. My mother may have been a religious nut and an altogether strange person, but she loved me, in her way. Like me, she needed a strong man. A man who hides behind nothing and no one.

Sweeney and I walk arm in arm along the riverside. The fog over the slate-colored water is occasionally lit by boat lights as they pass behind the haze.

The tall shards of London’s skyline are brittle against the bruised clouds, puncturing them so they can unleash another wave of icy drizzle.

“I was somewhat rude before.” Sweeney throws me a sideways glance. “You’re a pistol, Nellie, but I needed to talk to Marianne, and now whatever she knew is in your swilling pail.”

“I know,” I reply. “I appreciate the help with that, by the way. Once the red mist descends, it’s all a bit horrible, isn’t it?”

He frowns. “You think you’re one and done? Actually, that reminds me; did you kill Harry?”

I blanch, unsure of the best approach. Under the circumstances, there’s no reason not to tell him the truth.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just that thing Wetherby said. I also wondered whether I should have even deeper reservations about eating your food than the ones I currently harbor.”

I swallow an absurd belch of mirth. “So you think I poisoned him?”

“Yes. Indulge me, treacle. Given the quality of the fare you serve, I’m willing to believe it was accidental.”

“It wasn’t.” I take the lighter of the hessian sacks from Sweeney’s hand, swinging it by my side. “Harry was suffering, Mr. T. I swear he was. I was fond of the old fart and didn’t want to see him go through pain. And the doctor’s bills, dear Christ! All the quack did was entertain the man while he waited to die. Burning fucking herbs and blood-letting and other bollocks.”

“So what did you use?”

“Arsenic. What can I say? I’m a cliché.”

“I assume you used what you had.”

I nod. “Harry had picked up a bout of pox years ago, at sea. I found the capsules when I was looking for things to pawn.

At first, I was just giving him the odd one in his stew—it seemed to help his pain, and he slept better—but I started giving him more and more. He got sleepy and asked me to call the doctor far less often, which helped the finances.”

This is a cleaned-up version of the truth. Toward the end, I burned through a lot of blood-and-vomit-soaked linen. Harry would retch and curse, howling for God or a medic to either come to his aid or fuck themselves to high heaven.

I swore up and down that someone was on the way, or they’d been by while he slept, but by the time his blue tongue lolled from his mouth for the last time, he hadn’t seen a doctor in four months. I had to pay one more time for the cart to collect him, but no one showed any interest.

As far as was ever said, Harry Lovett died of gout and a bad temperament, leaving poor Mrs. Lovett with a struggling business. So where that bastard Wetherby got the gall to walk into my shop and blurt out the inconvenient truth, I'll never know.

“Who knows, love.” Sweeney stops at the turn onto Tower Bridge. “Maybe you just look like the type.”

I didn’t realize I’d been musing aloud, and I’m not sure when I started speaking, but it doesn’t matter. Sweeney’s eyes are bright in the lamplight, and his attention feels like the sun on my face.

The bridge is deserted, as well as it might be on a night like this. People are outside the alehouse on the other side, but we’d be invisible to them even if we were three feet away. I can only make them out because of the brightness of the pub’s open door.

Sweeney holds the sack open and looks inside. A sweet smell emerges; congealed blood and the beginnings of putrefaction. I know it well because my whole shop fucking smells like that, and all the lye and elbow grease in the world will never get it up from between my flagstones.

“Any parting missive for our girl here?” Sweeney asks.

I remember my mother’s pious utterances over the sunken heads of graying newborns, dressed in their funeral finery. Some shit she could summon up under those most trying and personal circumstances.

“Oh lawd,” I say, affecting Mama’s atrocious East End inflection. “Lawd above. Make beside you a place fo’ this po’ child o’ yours, that she may live in your gloooorrry, furrever’ n’ evver. Wiv’ ‘oly Mary’s grace in ‘er, Lawd, Amen.”

Sweeney roars with laughter. Emboldened, I spit into the bag, my saliva running over Marianne’s pallid cheek.

“Never mind,” I say, “Fuck yourself, you little tramp. All in all, it’s not been your day, has it?”

Sweeney shrugs as he tosses the sack into the water. “Depends how you look at it. She’s dead, which means she’s off the hook.”

We look at each other and dissolve into laughter again.

What a time to be alive.

The bag containing Marianne’s hands bobs away after her head, and both soon vanish, caught in the undertow. They will wash up somewhere, of course, nibbled beyond recognition by swimming critters.

Our levity doesn’t last; the city’s concrete sky bears down, crushing, impenetrable. Sweeney’s hands grip the rail beside mine, and I flex my smallest finger so I can stroke his, but he does not respond.

Once again, he is as gray and stony as a New World idol, a statue representing an unrestrained and mystical element.

I fear him still, but it makes me feel alive. My slow blood surges through me for the first time in my life. With Sweeney back with me in this faded, filthy town, all I see is color.

He seeks Johanna, and I believe I know why. He looks for something he dares not hope to find, not within, but without.

Does he not understand that to touch his daughter’s life would be to sully it with all he is and can only ever be?

I’m afraid of him. But, more so, I’m afraid for him.

Break through, Nellie. Bring him back.

“I could use a drink,” I say, nudging him. “And believe it or not—I’m hungry.”