To tear open the letter and to read it with great care, was the work of
a few moments only, and then drawing a long breath, the cook said--

"Thank God! I shall not stop another night in this place. I shall be
free before midnight. Oh, what an oppressive--what an overpowering joy
it will be to me once more to see the sky--to breathe pure fresh air,
and to feel that I have bid adieu for ever to this dreadful--dreadful
place." The poor cook looked around him with a shudder, and then he had hardly
placed the magistrate's letter securely in his bosom, when the little
missive from Mrs. Lovett came fluttering to his feet, through the crack
in the roof. "'Tis well," he said, when he had read it. "'Tis very well. This will
chime in most admirably with my instructions from Sir Richard Blunt. Mrs. Lovett I thank you. You shall have the nine o'clock batch. Oh, yes,
you shall have them. I am all obedience. Alas, if she whom I loved had
not been false to me, I might yet, young as I am, feel the sunshine of
joy in the great world again. But I can never love another, and she is
lost--lost to me for ever. Ay, for ever!" With this the poor cook, who but a few moments before had been so elated
by the thoughts of freedom, sat himself down, and in quite a
disconsolate manner rested his head upon his hands, and gave himself up
to bitter fancy. "That she should be false to me," he said mournfully. "It does indeed
almost transcend belief. She, so young, so gentle, so innocent, and so
guileless. If an angel from Heaven had come and told me as much I should
have doubted still; but I cannot mistrust the evidence of my own senses. I saw her. Yes, I saw her!" The cook rose and paced the gloomy place to and fro in the restlessness
of a blighted heart, and no one to look at him could for a moment have
supposed that he was near his freedom from an imprisonment of the most
painful and maddening description to one of his impatient temperament. But so it is with us all; no sooner do we to all appearance see the end
of one evil, than with an activity of imagination worthy to be excited
in better things, we provide ourselves with some real or unreal reason
for the heartache. "I will so contrive," said the cook, "that before I leave for ever the
land of my birth, I will once more look upon her. Yes, I will once again
drink in, from a contemplation of her wondrous beauty, most delicious
poison; and then when I have feasted my eyes, and perchance grieved my
heart, I will at once go far away, and beneath the sun of other skies
than this, I will wait for death." The more the poor cook thought of this unknown beauty of his, who surely
had behaved to him very ill, or he could not have spoken of her in such
terms, the more sorrow got upon his countenance, and imparted its sad
sweetness to his tones. Surely the time had not been very far distant
when that young man must have been in a widely different sphere of life
to that limited one in which he now moved. Suddenly, however, he was recalled to a consciousness of what he had to
do, by the clock striking seven. He counted the strokes, and then
pausing before one of the large ovens, he said--

"The time has now come when I must cease to be making preparations to
obey the mandate of my imperious mistress. She will not now be content
merely to have issued her orders, but she will keep an eye upon me to
see that they are being executed, and unarmed as I am, and without the
knowledge of what power of mischief she may have, I feel that it would
not be safe yet to provoke her. No--no. I must seem to do her bidding." With this, the cook set about the manufacture of the pies; and as it
would really have been much more troublesome to sham making them than to
make them in earnest, he really did manufacture a hundred of them. But it was after all with a very bad grace that the poor imprisoned cook
now made the pies; and probably so very indifferent a batch of those
delicious pieces of pastry had never before found its way into the ovens
of Mrs. Lovett. The cook was not wrong in his idea that his imperious
mistress would take a peep at him before nine o'clock. At about eight,
the little grating in the high-up door was tapped by something that Mrs.
Lovett had in her hand, with which to attract the attention of the cook. He looked up, and saw her dimly. "Are you busy?" she said. "Yes, madam, as busy as the nine o'clock batch usually makes me. Do you
not hear the oven?" "I do--'tis well." "Ah, madam," said the dissembling cook, "it will be well, indeed, if you
keep your word with me, and set me to-night at freedom." "Do you doubt it?" "I have no particular reason to doubt it, further than that the
unfortunate are always inclined to doubt too good news. That is all,
madam." "If you doubt, you will be agreeably disappointed, for I shall keep my
word with you. You have done for me much better than I ever expected,
and I will be grateful to you now that you are going. I have said that
you shall not go without means, and you shall have a purse of twenty
guineas to help you on your way wherever you wish." "How kind you are, madam! Ah, I shall be able now to forgive you for all
that I have suffered in this place--and, after all, it has been a refuge
from want." "It has. No one can be better pleased than I am to find you view things
so reasonably. Send up the nine o'clock batch; and then wait patiently
until I come to you." "I will." "Till then, good-night!" Mrs. Lovett left the grating; and as she went up to the shop, she
muttered to herself--

"They will, when they find him here, suspect he is an accomplice. Well,
let them hang him, for all I care. What can it matter to me?" CHAPTER CXII. MRS. LOVETT FINDS THAT IT IS EASIER TO PLAN THAN TO EXECUTE. It wants five minutes to nine, and Mrs. Lovett's shop is filling with
persons anxious to devour or to carry away one or more of the nine
o'clock batch of savoury, delightful, gushing gravy pies. Many of Mrs. Lovett's customers paid her in advance for the pies, in
order that they might be quite sure of getting their orders fulfilled
when the first batch should make its gracious appearance from the depths
below. "Well, Jiggs," said one of the legal fraternity to another, "how are you
to-day, old fellow? What do you bring it in?" "Oh! I ain't very blooming. The fact is, the count and I, and a few
others, made a night of it last evening; and somehow or another I don't
think whiskey-and-water, half-and-half, and tripe, go well together." "I should wonder if they did." "And so I've come for a pie just to settle my stomach; you see I'm
rather delicate." "Ah! you are just like me, young man, there," said an elderly personage;
"I have a delicate stomach, and the slightest thing disagrees with me. A
mere idea will make me quite ill."

"Will it, really?" "Yes; and my wife, she--"

"Oh, bother your wife! It's only five minutes to nine, don't you see? What a crowd there is, to be sure.