Page 86 of Razors & Ruin

“Well done, love.” He kisses my blood-soaked lips. “That’s my girl.”

EPILOGUE

Christmas Day…

Sweeney

Aworkhouse Christmas is at least as tragic as a prison one, as I know too well. No gifts, no goose, and no goodwill toward men.

Having never received much of the latter, I’m not much inclined to dish it up, but Nellie is a different creature.

She’s far better than I at pretending to be a normal, functioning member of society, with the happy outcome that her festive Christmas Day sitting is packed to the rafters.

It was all I could do to coax a few stragglers upstairs, but that’s fine with me. Technically speaking, I’m not the breadwinner, although I consider myself under-appreciated, an unsung hero. The man who fills both the piesandthe piemaker.

Happenstance continues to smile upon us; despite skirting so close to discovery, we never attracted the interest of any official who was charged with investigating the disappearances.

Sommers was assumed to have fled to avoid his considerable debts, and as for the Beadle, the rumors about him were enough to make the middle-class housewives of the city clutch their pearls.

I sit at Nellie’s counter and watch her bustle and bark, keeping her little army on its toes.

“Ale for this table,” she says, jabbing a finger. “Quick now. Clear this one. Customers are waiting!”

The workhouse kids are thrilled to be here. Not only is it warm, but Nellie doesn’t work them too hard, and she doesn’t hit them, either.

Her maternal streak appeals to me, but fathering a child upon her would be more than a bit irresponsible, given our lifestyle.

Those bakehouse stairs are a fucking death trap, and there are way too many sharp objects lying around.

The kids get fed, not the award-winning Mrs. Todd’s Meat Pies, but the stuffweeat. It makes Nellie happy to give hungry kiddies the finest food money can buy while rich and poor alike eat each other instead.

She put her prices up recently in an effort to drive demand down a bit, but it did nothing to reduce the queues that start stacking up earlier evening by evening.

I spear a chunk of pie from the plate before me. We have a system to keep the food separate—all the punter’s pies are madeand stored downstairs now—so I’m certain this one is lamb and potato.

It tastes fine, but presumably, italldoes. The scraped plates and daily sell-out are a testament to that.

So who’s the fool? For all I know, I’m missing out, and those flea-bitten tribespeople were onto something with their long pig and short tempers.

Nellie parts with her last pastry at four in the afternoon, and I have the unenviable job of disappointing the line of pie lovers still waiting outside.

The kids take their meal at her table and put away more ale than a shipful of sailors could imbibe over an entire voyage. We wave them off as they meander back to the workhouse, a trail of uneven footprints in the snow behind them.

It’s dark now, and I extinguish the parlor lights upstairs. Few men were of a mind to visit a barber on Christmas Day, so business was slow, but now the night is drawing in. Before long, the streets will be empty.

I find Nellie in her lounge, admiring the present I got for her. It’s a locket in gold, with my picture on one side, and she’s squinting at it, smiling.

“Is this an etching?” she asks. “It’s familiar.”

“That’s because it’s my face, treacle. You see it every day, apart from when you’re sitting on it.”

I sit beside her on the couch and hand her a glass of mulled wine. “The picture was from a newspaper,” I say. “Don’t I look dashing?””

“That’s it!” she says, sipping her wine. “I had the bigger version on my wall. You’ve no idea how many times you looked down on me while I touched my pussy and wished you were there to fuck it.”

“What a charming notion, Mrs. T.” I kiss her neck. “I will add that to the wank bank, if you’ll excuse an indelicate term.”

Her gift to me is a razor. I pick it up from the box on the table and admire the perfect sheen of the handle, my name embossed on the surface.

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