Not while I'm around

There was a barber and his wife.
And he was beautiful.
A proper artist with a knife,
But they transported him for life.
And he was beautiful…

In a way it was all Lucy`s fault.If she had stayed away from the parlour,bloody Judge Turpin would have never laid eyes on her in the first place.He wouldn`t have sent greasy Beadle Bamford into the pie shop to casually inquire if she had any idea where the barber and his wife resided.If Lucy had been clever she could easily have used the Judge`s infatuation with her for her own benefit.

If she hadn`t decided to play prim and proper the Judge would never have seen the need to get her guileless husband out of the way.It was her fault that one day Beadle Bamford conveniently happened to discover the Judge`s recently stolen golden pocket watch hidden beneath a stack of towels at the parlour.Her fault that Benjamin Barker was arrested,tried and found guilty of theft.And yet she dared cry!It had appalled and disgusted Lovett when the Bow Street Runners had taken him away,looking so pale and frightened and his stupid wife clinging to him,tearfully insisting that there had to have been a mistake,that her husband wasn`t a thief.

The biggest mistake was when he married you,style='mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'>she´d thought.And yet it had fallen to her to comfort the still sobbing Lucy as she sat in the pie shop,moaning about how such a terrible fate could befall them.How she couldn`t bear to live without “her Benjamin”,how she didn`t know what would become of her and little Johanna now.

It was always just about her.Lovett would have liked to slap her when the still almost hysteric woman had started to babble about taking poison.How pathetically melodramatic.If she had taken poison before he met her,”her Benjamin” would still be a free man.Of course instead of slapping her Lovett had just patted her arm and said “there,there” and other meaningless nonsense usually reserved for comforting a crying child,trying to hide her dislike towards the other woman.

There had been no way of telling then what the sentence would be.Since Benjamin Barker was considered a first time offender he would probably escape the gallows,but apart from that?Several years in Newgate if he was lucky,deportation if he wasn`t.If Judge Turpin presided over his trial,and she`d have been very surprised if he didn`t,deportation was almost certain.

It had taken Lovett a while before it really hit her that Lucy wasn`t the only one who would probably never see beautiful Benjamin Barker again.