Page 22 of Razors & Ruin

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 fuckinghatethem. 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 overme. 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. “Heshouldbe 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 meantthem.” 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, butright 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.”

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