The String of Pearls (1850), p. 348

tween the thought and the execution of a project with her. The recent scene that had taken place in front of her window decided her. Now or never! she told herself. Now or never is the time to escape. I have nothing to encumber myself with. Let Todd keep his jewels and trinkets. All I want is the money which is in the hands of Mr. Anthony Brown, the stock-broker, and that I will have forthwth. Mrs. Lovett did not know the exact amount; but as it was a joint account, such an amount of ignorance need not appear at all surprising to the stock-broker; so she drew up an order for the money, and signed it with both Todd's name and her own, leaving a blank for the amount. She then carefully locked up all doors but that of the outer shop, and having procured the services of a young girl from a greengrocer's shop in the vicinity, to mind the place for an hour, as she said, she considered she was all right. The girl had attended to the shop before for Mrs. Lovett at times when no batches of pies were expected from the regions below, so she did not feel at all surprised at the call upon her services.
"I shall be an hour," said Mrs. Lovett. "You can take a pie or two for yourself if you feel at all hungry; and if Mr. Todd should come in, say I'm gone to call upon a dress-maker in Bond-street."
"Yes, mum!"
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 condesended to alight from his high stool, and he demanded the lady's pleasure.