Razors & Ruin (Rare Horrors #1)

Chapter 12

12

Sweeney

T he alehouse is everything Nellie’s place isn’t.

Bright, jolly, and, crucially, busy. The patrons pack out every table, quaffing from tankards and oilskins of wine as they tear into skillets of pig’s trotters, bubble-and-squeak, and the ubiquitous meat pies.

“From the scent, I suspect there’s real meat in those,” Nellie says as we slide onto the end of a bunch. “And look at the clientele. Whoever runs the place charges enough to bring better than the great unwashed through the doors.”

I slide my eyes over the room and see she’s right. Laughing and braying are the diners from the other side; our betters, as they would have it.

Politicians, judges, lawmen, priests, teachers, and the gentry. The latter have the least propriety of all, snorting like farmyard animals as they guzzle and hobnob.

I fucking hate them. Every single one of these men should be stuck and bled like the fodder they are. All I can think of are their queasy, fat livers, turning to paté in their rotten guts.

Overfed, overpopulated, and over me . Why? Nothing more than an accident of birth, a stroke of providence neither earned nor appreciated.

Nellie sees my sneer and frowns. “Come now, Mr. T. What’s on your mind?”

“These swine.” The words fall from me like lead shot. “Not a one of them earned their good fortune.”

“Who does, dear.” She touches my forearm, stroking it. “Good or bad, I don’t think there’s a person alive who’s getting all they deserve.”

A large woman with a rolling bosom stops beside us, slapping down two tin mugs. “Ale and what pie? We have beef and potato with cabbage, but you must be quick if you want the gravy. I’m down to my last.”

“That’s fine,” I say. Our server has returned a plate and two chargers, along with a small jug of the precious gravy. The pie’s lightly herbal aroma is underpinned by a rich, savory base that makes me pick up my fork.

We say nothing for a while. The heat from the fire lifts steam from our wet clothes, and as my circulation gathers pace, I feel my appetite flare. The pie doesn’t last long under our eager attention, and the flagons of beer do much to blur the edges.

But the view in the room still makes me bilious. Dancing firelight makes fat flesh shimmer where it sits on starched collars.

There’s something about the unselfconscious guffaw of the upper-class moron, too; a singularly invasive bark of mirth, issuing from the silver-spoon-sucking chops of men who grew up wanting for nothing. Only people who never had to keep their heads down can laugh that way.

Dear Christ. I could turn the river red. No one would care a whit.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t be caught—I suspect my heavy hand with the gormless Wetherby may yet come back to haunt me—but the lifeblood of this city wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep over it if the bloated bodies of London society started washing up with the whelks.

“What’ll we do?” Nellie asks, her voice irritating in the cavern of my mind. “You need clients, and I need customers.”

“I have the Beadle Higgins coming by tomorrow,” I say. “He knows all these pricks. I do a good job, and he might send me some business. Services rendered will be free to him, of course.”

“The Beadle.” Nellie tosses her fork onto the table. “He should be bloody rendered. Get that fat off the meat and save me a fortune in lard.”

I’m not listening. In the gravy, there is a small chunk of something sharp on my plate. I pick it up between my fingertips, turning it in the light as I inspect it.

“Our lady chef has some interesting secret ingredients,” I say. “Do you know what this is?” I hold it so she can see better. “It’s a piece of jawbone. From an animal not normally found in a pie.”

“What kind of animal?”

“Something distinctly common, entirely disgusting, impossible to avoid, and crawling over everything. Something I don’t want to fucking consume, that’s for sure.”

Her expression of confusion is pitiful, and I relent. “It’s rat teeth, treacle. She’s padding out the pastries with vermin.”

“Oh!” she laughs. “For a minute there, I thought you meant them .” You gesticulates at the madding crowd. “Seemed to fit the description.”

I pick up my ale and throw it back, trying to push back a hiccup of well-seasoned rat. “You think I don’t want to eat the rich? Fucking think again.”

The shop looms from the darkness, pulling us along Fleet Street and back to where we belong.

No place here for the fop and the dandy, at least, not yet. But the gloaming offers a perverse comfort; it, like us, offers no artiface or facade.

Mrs Lovett and I belong to spaces such as these, in the same way as the creatures of the deep, all teeth and ancient humors, know and love the wretched fathoms that draw men’s souls to doom.

The Beadle will come, and with him, a strategy to find my child and turn the page of a story I’m afraid to read.

It will all come to bear; at this moment, though, I’m fired in my bones, hot inside with rage and impotent longing for things I do not understand. When I can see a way forward, I will move, but right now, I’m biting the bars, breaking my teeth on the need for relief.

We head straight for the bakehouse, keen to see how the rest of Marianne is shaping up. Gratifyingly, she’s down to little more than charred fragments of bone and a puddle of grease, hissing as it fries on the oven’s bottom.

“Smelly cow,” Nellie says. She closes the hatch with a swing of the iron bar, and the fire is suffocated, smoke billowing up the chimney and out into the clammy night air. “Give that a few minutes, and I’ll rake it out.”

The pieces of Marianne’s skin look deader than ever now, and the vibrant glow of the fire isn’t here to give them some movement. Only the cool filaments of the low lamps keep the gloom from seeping into our bones in this forsaken place. Who knew rock bottom had a basement?

Nellie Lovett wants her picket fence. She doesn’t understand that she cannot be kept that way, clean and safe in a home with four walls, a roof, and a crucifix on the bedroom wall. She killed a woman, but was it for her or me? I don’t know for sure, and in a way, it doesn’t matter.

But a crazy notion refuses to die. Family . We could be happy in our own way. Boxed up pretty, with a bow, and offered to my poor Johanna. Is that the deal? We’ll be human, my little princess, but only for you.

Fat chance. I dropped pieces of a dead woman in the Thames only an hour ago. There is no tender bosom of love to which my child might return, even in my imagination.

All that exists here is Nellie, who is all hard edges, just as I am. No mother she, and no father I.

Which is not to say I can leave it alone. I never had much talent for avoiding pain. I like to inflict it, but I aim not to be a hypocrite. I will do what I must to discover Johanna’s fate, and it starts with the Beadle. He’s merely a catalyst, and although I hate him, I must tread gently for now.

God’s judgement will come when the time is right, but I dare to hope to be His instrument, if he deigns to use a creature such as I to do His works.

“The Beadle better have something for me tomorrow,” I say. “I need chins to shave and heads to cut.”

“Off?” Nellie shoots me a grin as she checks the drying strips of flesh. “Or just a trim?”

“Don’t fucking tempt me.”

I go to her side and take her collarbone beneath my palm. “Once I make some money, we can see about getting you some better stock. That said, are you quick on your feet? You needn’t wait; I can equip you with a burlap sack and a piano leg if you fancy a skirmish through the back alleys.”

“Urgh. Don’t mention it again. At least the wealthy cunts in that place were clean.”

“All depends on what you have an appetite for, doesn’t it, treacle?” I turn her neck so I can see the marks I made. “That reminds me.”

I reach into my pocket and extract a thick band of velvet and white lace. “Marianne won’t need this anymore. It couldn’t keep her silly head on her neck, but you might have better luck.”

Nellie’s cheeks burn, and she pulls her hair up from her nape so I can tie the choker in place. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll give it a wash. It’s inviting an Anne Boleyn comparison that, under the circumstances, might be best resisted.”

I can’t help but smile at that. I’ve noticed a change in her patois since we first ran into the well-spoken Marianne; an uptick in her vocabulary and syntax, a nod to a better education than I’d suspected.

It’s more than that, however; it speaks to her festering insecurity. So unsure is Nellie of her value in the world that she must absorb it from others, like a vampire.

So empty a vessel deserves to be filled, and I have my ways.

“A besotted king who had his woman beheaded when she displeased him? I see no contradictions. We simply don’t know where we are in the story yet.”

I rest my hands on her shoulders, feeling the chill of her skin. It won’t do to give without taking something away; the balance must stay with me.

She makes me think of such dynasties; the warrior barbarians of old who, despite their wealth and pomp, were savages to the core.

Civilization and bestiality run always into the same seam, just as the river carries effluent through the heart of London and out into the killing sea.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Nellie whispers, facing me. “Not in the way you think.”

I grip her chin, my other hand sliding around her waist. “I know what my pretty little hellion wants. You think I got away from you today, and now you’re ready to drag me back.”

She nods, dark eyes glittering, but she doesn’t smile. “That cunt had nothing to offer you. I’ve given you everything, Mr. T. What have you got for Nellie?”

“I wanna hurt you.” I bite her cheekbone, and she buckles in my arms. “You gonna let me have my way? Show me why it has to be you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes are closed, her voice distant. “Yes.”

“Wrong answer.” Her lids fly open. “It’s a quiet night and very late now. There’s no one around. Take a lamp and leave; you have one minute before I follow. If you make it through the park, I’ll find you at the other side and, on bended knee, demand your hand.”

Her jaw drops. “And if I don’t make it?”

I release her and step away. “Time’s a-wasting, treacle.”

She pauses, but not for long. Her hand clutches the lantern from the table, and with a tortured gasp of alarm, she’s away, her boots echoing on the stone floor as she runs for the stairs.