Razors & Ruin (Rare Horrors #1)

Chapter 21

21

Nellie

I cleave Uriah’s head from the spine with several firm swipes of the chopper before putting it in the saucepan.

I can’t have his teeth turning up in a pie, but I can boil his head and make brawn. Serve it on the side, a penny a slice.

Waste not, want not .

The rest of him comes apart easily, as any meat will, sloughing away from the bone in long fillets. Not all of it is useful; there needs to be some fat in with the muscle, but luckily, his love handles give me plenty to go on, and then it’s into the grinder.

Harry insisted on the big, industrial-size mincing machine but neglected to pay for the motorized version, meaning I have to hand-crank the fucking thing.

Still, the blades are as sharp as a nun’s tongue and just as capable of reducing a man to shreds.

So now I have a handsome-looking trough of minced meat, ready to fill the pies that will be standing proud, in rows of ten at a time, on my counter tomorrow.

Maybe we’ll make a fuss, call it a grand reopening at dinnertime, and pull the punters in off the streets with the homestead scent of a good, hot meal.

All comers, of high or low estate, you’re all the same to Mrs. Lovett! Glad to serve you either way.

Now, to the real business of the evening. Sweeney left an hour ago, and I can wait no longer.

I wash up quickly and put up my hair with a silver comb. A bit of rouge and powder goes a long way to pretty me up, and I even rummage out a cake of kohl, combing it into my eyelashes.

I regard my blotchy neck with some trepidation before I remember; I own a whisp of chiffon that’ll do as a scarf if I attach a cameo to it.

The dress is white, with a full skirt and petticoat. I suspect it’s a fine lady’s debut gown, intended to show off her potential at her first coming-out ball. I don’t recall where it came from—I think it was always here—but it lives in a box with pasted cabbage roses on the lid.

With some costume pearls and delicate matching gloves, I look pretty as a picture, and the classic gold Venetian mask covers my face completely, with only my eyes to give me away. Mr. T isn’t the only one who found a minute to nip to the pawnbrokers today.

If he is loyal, he won’t test me, and he won’t know I’m there. So there’s nothing for him to get mad at me about. Unless he acts out and makes me intervene, I will hang back.

I don’t trust him, of course. He wrapped his sexually rapacious aura around him like a highwayman’s cloak and stole off into the night, more than ready to weave his spells and get what he wanted.

So dear Nellie will have to swing by and see what’s a-brewing.

I arrive at The Regent and join the back of a small group as they enter the hotel, hoping they’re going my way.

To my astonishment, no one accosts me, assuming I belong to this little herd of laughing fops and their flighty women. As we ride the elevator, the tinkling giggles of the society wives ring in my skull, and it’s all I can do to pout and titter alike.

Once inside the ballroom, I press the mask to my face and peel away, my eyes darting. It doesn’t seem wise to wander too far, so I pick up a coupé of champagne from a passing tray and perch on a chaise, partly obscured by a potted spider plant.

The room has a lazy, louche atmosphere, indiscretion heavy in the air like it’s being pumped in. People huddle, sharing whispers and loud commentary, sometimes interchangeably.

“He sank his ship on purpose, you know, for the insurance.”

“So rich! True, he likes to fraternize with very young boys. But, as I say, simply minted.”

Minted. Good idea. Mint sauce is strong stuff, popular, too, and cheap enough to make.

I very much hope Sweeney attends to the chin—and the neck—of the child-troubling man of means who is the subject of the nearby conversation. I like the idea of directing my murder-happy lover in such a way that he could be one soul’s angel and another’s damnation, depending on each party’s perspective.

Then I see him. My Sweeney Todd, holding court at the center of a small crowd. He is cutting the hair of none other than Lord Francis Wetherby, who is sitting on a chaise of his own and looks about as comfortable as he might if he was watching someone fuck his wife.

From where I’m sitting, he may yet get to do just that. The woman tucked beside Wetherby has only taken up so close a position to her husband because it gets her closer to the barber she clearly finds so fascinating.

Beneath her finery, she’s frothing for him to an almost embarrassing extent. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I can smell her cunt from here.

She can certainly smell mine , emanating from Sweeney’s collar like the tag of a territorial animal, and yet she persists, pouting and flexing her body as Sweeney moves around His Lordship’s head, trimming and shaping.

Behind her pink feathered half-mask, her eyes are liquid, like honey, and they never falter as she watches my man work.

Mr. T is more at home than he’d admit. Far from the circus he expected, the attention on him is more restrained, like he’s a craftsman and should be respected as such.

He likes it. I see it in his movements; he’s not tense with hatred but loose, moving languidly through his hips in a way that makes me really, really want to fuck him.

I’m not the only one.

I drain the fizz and snatch another. Wetherby’s odyssey of grooming is complete, and the precision of Sweeney’s handiwork draws a smatter of applause.

I have to laugh to myself; it seems the wealthy are curiously lacking in interests. Although, of course, that’s what this venture is all about—to dive below the glossy surface and see what’s in the mud.

“Beatrix!” Wetherby calls to his wife as she springs to Sweeney’s side. “Won’t you come over here, dear, and tell Mrs. Wynter about Cannes?”

“Oh, but I don’t?—”

My chest seizes as Sweeney takes her hand. He kisses it, and I swear the bitch gushes beneath her skirt. He leans in to whisper something in her ear, and she flushes, apple-cheeked and precious beneath her dark curls.

Then she’s away back to her husband’s side, for now. I’m surprised she doesn’t slip in her own puddle as she goes.

Sweeney shakes hands with The Beadle and a few others. He’s obviously spent some time hobnobbing before I arrived, and his new friends assure him they will bring their whiskers for his magical attention before the week is out.

He thanks them with a restrained politeness that has me enthralled; who knew he could act this way? He fucking hates everyone in this room with a passion—the chiffon at my throat and my long sleeves hide the evidence of what festers at the core of him.

Yet tonight, in this place, he’s metamorphosed into something else, and I find myself pondering the possibility of keeping at least some of this version for myself.

Mrs. Nellie Todd . I always wanted to take on a name and pretend my parents called me Nellie as a nickname. Ellen or Eleanor? Mrs. Eleanor Lovett-Todd?

There’s no way Sweeney would let me cling to Harry that way. He’d own me entirely or not at all.

Nellie and Sweeney. Sweeney and Nellie.

I’m blurry from the champers, lost in thought, and I don’t notice Mr. T until he’s practically on top of me. His eyes pass over mine, hidden in the hollows of my gold mask, and it’s all too clear; he simply doesn’t recognize me.

In my girly dress, bright and clean in candle-lit luxury, he can’t see who I am. The likes of me don’t belong here; he expects to find me in this room as he expects to find a cluster of syphilitic whores, or a plague of rats. Things that have their place, but that place is not here, so it never crosses his mind.

He passes by and out the door, but I know I’ll see him again. He’ll drift back into the party in his better coat, fae-like disguise in place, ready to lure the cunt-struck Lady Wetherby to a secluded corner and woo secrets from her.

I belch, and a woman standing nearby glares at me.

“Fuck yourself, you fat slag,” I say, and her hand flutters to her throat as she scuttles away.

The champagne tray sails my way once more, and I pick up my third glass, watching with narrow eyes as Lord Wetherby rolls his eyes and gives his pretty wife his back. Beatrix Wetherby produces a compact from her beaded purse and begins to primp.

I tap the waiter on the shoulder as he walks away. “Wait,” I say. “Give me another one of those.”

I sidle over the shiny floor toward my mark. “Ooh, did you see him?” I ask, affecting the budgerigar-like trill I keep hearing in these cultured voices. “What an uncommon man, Mr. Todd. Such talent.”

Beatrix takes the offered glass and gives me her slightly unfocused gaze. She’s a little sloppy, which makes things easier for me.

Being too shallow to see past my surface attire, she assumes I’m one of her people; a young woman who went to boarding school or had a governess, swooned over my friend’s older brothers, and entertained lurid but fairly safe fantasies of clean but naughty rakes.

The we’re-all-girls-here smile gives her away; she will spill like a freshly slashed vein in every sense of the word.

“That barber is such a man , don’t you think?” She pulls me to sit beside her. “Sorry, I’m Bee.”

Of course she calls herself Bee. That’s why Sweeney’s honey is doing such an excellent job of getting her buzzing.

I place my palm on my chest. “Eleanor. So, who is he, anyway? Where did he come from? He’s so handsome.”

“He’s got me a little… warm , shall we say.” She giggles, and I suppress the wrinkle in my nose as she drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He said he’d sneak back in and find me.”

“What about your husband?” I ask.

She gives a haughty snort. “Dear Francis has tastes that run contrary to appearances. I am window dressing to camouflage his affliction.”

I arch a brow. “He’s a?—

“No. The other thing. The worse thing.” She waves her hand as she sips her drink. “So many of them are at it, now and again, but My Lord over there is seasoned.”

Ha . He will be, I have no doubt. It’ll take a fair bit of pepper and more than a touch of sage to stop that greasy bastard from sticking in the craw.

I glance at Wetherby, imagining him wearing a little pastry hat, and a gassy hiccup of laughter escapes my lips.

“So tell me.” I watch as Bee guzzles her fizz eagerly. This will be easy. “How does he get his hands on, you know…children?”

She shuffles closer. “The ones who go to the poorhouse? Many are never registered, and those who do make the books are easily explained away. Typhoid here, an injury there. No one cares when the great and good like Lord Francis Wetherby patronizes the facilities and takes such good care of them. Who would look into it? Wealthy men like him pay a lot to maintain an image of philanthropy and keep mouths shut.”

There’s bitterness in her voice, and I wonder if she ever suffered the late-night visits from her own Papa like me. Pretending to be asleep, groping hands stealing beneath the sheets, me hoping he’d get bored quickly.

I shake off the fledging sense of affinity and stay the course.

“I knew a little girl once whose parents died,” I say. “She went into Porter’s workhouse about ten years ago and was never heard from again.”

Bee nods. “That’s when it began in earnest. There’s a clergyman who took some of them for a spell. Different ages, mostly girls, although he was not above training boys. As long as someone pays. They’re meant to go into service, and they do, but their duties…” her eyes fill, surprising me, “well, you understand. It’s hardly a secret in this social circuit, but we don’t speak of it openly. Too unsavory.”

All of you sick fucks are entirely savory enough for my purposes, dearie.

At least Mr. T and I have the guts to take on people of our own size, with power and weight, not snatch from cradles and lonely corners where orphans huddle, waiting to be picked off.

“So that’s where Johanna Cope ended up, I suppose.”

“If she was a baby, then I would bet on it.”

“And dead now, I’ll warrant.”

She frowns. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Quite the investment, these children. She’s very possibly alive somewhere. I wouldn’t get involved,” she tosses her curls, “but?—”

He’s back.

Just like that, Sweeney is right there, towering over the two of us, resplendent in his fine outfit and mask. Once again, he sees nothing; not me, nor the haziness of Beatrix, the soporific ease with which he wordlessly takes her hand and draws her to her feet.

It was a simple matter to dose her drink with hemlock tincture; I extracted the vial from my cleavage and added a drop or two right before I came over to join her.

Its grassy, lemony taste was made to sit well with champagne, and the bitch never noticed a thing. She’s feeling it now, but I see a twitch in her cheek and wonder if I gave her too much.

Sweeney leads the swaying Beatrix toward the door, and I understand—he’s taking her to the courtyard outside, to a quiet nook, where she will open her legs and her stupid careless mouth for him. The Regent’s Ball is known for such shenanigans; her kiddy-fiddling husband will not look for her there.

If Sweeney hears what I just heard about Johanna, he will never give up. He will take the city—the world—to pieces, searching for the only part of him that still lives in the light.

I have to stop this. And I fucking warned him, too. If he touches Beatrix like he touches me , I’ll snuff her out slowly and enjoy it. Not just kill her, because death itself is easy.

I’ll make her suffer to her last breath.

I throw back the last of my drink and make to follow, only to be swept into the arms of a pissed-up young tick who swings me gaily into a bloody quadrille dance.

He laughs in my face, his pudgy hands on my waist, and I realize I can do nothing about it. If I don’t play along, I risk drawing attention, which cannot happen.

I will silence you, Beatrix Wetherby. Johanna is dead, and so are you.