Mrs. Lovett left the shop. At the corner of Bell-yard she turned and cast a glance at it. She hoped it was a farewell one—She shuddered and passed on; and then she muttered to herself—
"If I am—which assuredly I shall be—successful in the city, I will take post-horses there at once for some sea-port, and from thence reach the Continent, before Todd can dream of pursuit, or find out what I have done, or where bestowed myself."
She was not so impudent as to pass Todd's shop, but she went down one of the streets upon the opposite side of Fleet-street, and came up another, which was considerably past the house which was so full of horrors. A lumbering old hackney coach met her gaze. It was disengaged, and Mrs. Lovett got into it.
"To Lothbury," she said; and after swaying to and fro for a few moments, the machine was set in action, and duly steering up Ludgate Hill.
The impatience of Mrs. Lovett was so great, that she would gladly have done anything to induce the horses to go at a faster rate than the safe two miles and a half an hour to which they were accustomed, but she dreaded that if she exhibited any signs of extreme impatience she might excite suspicion. To the guilty, any observation of a more than ordinary character is a thing to dread. They would fain glide through life gently, and not at all do they sigh to be—
"The observed of all observers."
But the longest journey even in the slowest hackney coach must come to an end. As Ben the beef-eater would have said—"Easy does it;" and as Mrs. Lovett's journey was anything but a long one, the gloomy precincts of Lothbury soon loomed upon her gaze. After the customary oscillations, and wheezing and creaking of all its joints and springs, the coach stopped.
"Wait," said Mrs. Lovett with commendable brevity; and alighting, she entered a dark door-way upon the side of which was painted, in letters that had contracted so much the colour of the wood-work that they were nearly illegible, "Mr. Anthony Brown."
This was the stock-broker, who held charge of the ill-gotten gains of that pair of un-worthies, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd. A small door, covered with what had been green baize, but which was now of some perfectly original brown, opened into the outer office of the man of business, and there a spruce clerk held dominion. At the sound of the rustling silks of Mrs. Lovett, he raised his head from poring over the cumbrous ledger; and then seeing, to use his own vernacular, it was "a monstrous fine woman," he condescended to alight from his high stool, and he demanded the lady's pleasure.
"Mr. Brown."