I wager that I can shave a cheek with ten times more dexterity than any street mountebank.

  ____________

  A year. That was how long Toby lasted with Pirelli.

  Looking back, sometimes Toby wasn't sure how it took him so long to get out. On the one hand, it was a job and a home. Having the wagon and some form of pay (in food scraps and gin) was better than the streets. But as for everything else, Toby might as well have stayed in the workhouse.

  He was hopeless at barbering. They found that out a week or so after Pirelli bought him. The "Italian" took a pair of scissors to a wig, perched on top of a hatbox. "Take the hair like so," he said gruffly, pinching some of it between two fingers. "Cut a straight line." Snip, snip, went the scissors, and blond hair fluttered to the cart floor. "There."

  Toby thought the line looked crooked, actually, but he didn't say anything. He tried to trim a black wig, more than once, but couldn't quite get the lines the same. Pirelli gave him several smacks to the face and no supper.

  Pirelli was a great one for the lashings, it turned out. When he was drunk, when Toby took a wrong turn, when he was angry that they hadn't found any customers, it was always Toby he took it out on. By the end of two weeks, his face and arms had more welts than he could count. By the end of the first month, he'd lost track of how many beatings he'd got.

  Toby was never a one for grumbling. But at least in the workhouse, you only got lashed if you did something wrong.

  ____________

  The winter of 1862–1863 was a hard one for Pirelli and Toby. Weather was no worse than usual, but nobody seemed to want or need barbering services. They stuck to South England, wandering from town to town, and even the smallest spots already had someone cutting hair and shaving people. Toby heard one man in a pub in High Wycombe mutter, "I wouldn't want me hair cut by no thieving Italian in the first place." So Pirelli's character, the fancy-airs Italian, didn't work in the countryside.

  Toby and Pirelli both sort of came up with the idea about four months after he got Toby. They were in a pub just on the outskirts of Oxford, the biggest city they'd seen in some time. The bustling streets and light haze of chimney smoke made Toby miss London. Pirelli was in one of his rare good moods; beer, not gin, was what to get into him for that. (Toby kept that thought for later.)

  "This world ain't interested in the honest man," Pirelli grumbled over his meat pie. Toby sat quietly, knowing it was best to just listen right now. "Quick-n-easy is all anyone wants, since all these newfangled machines started comin' in. Bloody Exhibition. And half this country's too stupid to know the difference between good and poor quality, anyway."

  He drank deep. "Not like that back in Ireland," he muttered. "When you have to live with one pair o'shoes or one potato plot your whole life, you know a good shoe from a poor one and good land from bad."

  Toby poked at his own pie for a moment. Careful. The wrong thing might make him mad. "There a way to give 'em what they want, sir? Quick-n-easy?"

  "Not unless you want your own razor at your throat after a quick shave, lad." Pirelli gazed thoughtfully at a group of men near the fireplace. One of them was bald. So bald Toby could swear he saw the fire glinting off his skin. Pirelli stared at the bald man for a long, long time. "Too stupid to tell the difference..." he muttered, almost to himself.

  ____________

  And that was how they got Pirelli's Miracle Elixir. It wasn't real, of course, just their piss saved in fancy glass bottles picked out of rubbish heaps. But the first customers who came to them were often desperate. Lots of older blokes trying to hang on to youth. Sometimes they got women too, usually whores that lost their hair after a sickness. So nobody asked questions, or looked too closely at the bottles.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Toby may have been useless at cutting hair, but he soon found he was good at rhyming. He came up with the jingle and tune all by himself one long drive toward Dartmoor: Try Pirelli's Miracle Elixir / That's what does the trick, sir, true sir, true / Is it quick, sir? New hair in a tick, sir / Just like an elixir ought to do!

  Toby was put in charge of getting the customers' attention, and they mastered the act quick. Reel the customers in with the song, some fast talking, and a fancy wig. Sell enough bottles to eat a week or two, then get out of town before anyone got wise. And if Toby's conscience twinged a little sometimes, it went quiet with a hot meal and a bed.

  It went well for a few months, but then country work dried up a little. It was go north, or try to make it in the city. Pirelli picked the city, and they entered near the London docks one chilly morning in November. Just after Toby's tenth birthday. As the cart trundled past the ships – such lovely names, the Siren, the Maelstrom, the newly arriving Bountiful – Toby felt his heart lift a little at the smell of the soot and shit and river.

  No place like London, right?

  ____________

  A few weeks later, they were in St. Dunstan's Market setting up the wares as they did every Thursday. Pirelli was already in a bad mood: they'd seen an awful lot of other folks selling hair and skin potions and other such things. The only way they could sell anything was by making their elixir the cheapest in town. Toby reminded himself of the new prices – penny buys a small bottle, thruppence a bigger one – as he arranged his wig. He scratched at the blond hair; perhaps its former owner had lice. His head itched something awful.

  "To-by!" roared Pirelli over the muttering crowds outside. He was slipping into the accent early today. "Get out-a there before-a the morning-a rush dies down!"

  Toby stuffed the wig under a flat cap, picked up his drum and ran out to the little platform outside the cart. He'd been practicing his new grabber song, as he liked to call them, since they got into town. He beat the drum, watching the heads turn, and half-sang, half-shouted the first line.

  "Ladies and gentlemen! May I have your attention pleeeeeease?" The women nodded and a few smiled, and Toby grinned back. Slide into song. "Do you wake every morning in shame and despair / To discover your pillow is covered with hair / What ought not to be there?" Pause for the nods. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, from now on you can awaken with ease! / You need never again have a worry or care, I will show you a miracle marvelous rare..."

  All was going well. He got through the grabber song and the jingle, even got a customer or two to buy some elixir. But then he heard a voice in the crowd, no, two voices. "What is this?" "Smells like piss!" Toby looked around, but couldn't tell where the voices were coming from. Time to distract. He pulled aside another customer, a balding man.

  "Let Pirelli's stimulate your roots, sir! Get Pirelli's, use a bottle of it, ladies seem to love it – "

  "Flies do too!" The woman's call was so loud and strong that a gap opened in the crowd. She didn't look old, nor young, but was dressed in a red and black frock. Sturdy workboots underneath, and a scrap of faded red cloth keeping black curls off her face. She stood arm in arm with a tall gentleman, barrel chested and not much older than her. His face was serious, but he cracked a grin at her joke, and Toby's eyes went to the white streak in his otherwise mouse-colored hair.

  It all went downhill from there. The crowd, egged on by the couple, clamored for their money back and demanded to see Pirelli until the man himself came out. The tall stranger called their product a fraud (true, that) and then challenged Pirelli himself to a contest. Toby sprinted round, getting the chairs ready, holding the sharpening strop even when the razor nicked his fingers. Five quid was a lot of money!

  A whistle blew in the crowd and Toby scuttled to the side. Pirelli pranced around as he was used to doing, boasting about how he'd shaved the Pope and such. All lies, but Toby always just kept his mouth shut. This time, though, he couldn't take his eyes off the stranger, the other barber. He just stood there, watching Pirelli with a faint mocking grin, and studying his client's face. Then scrape, scrape, scrape – and just like that, before Pirelli was even half done, smooth as a baby's arse. The whistle blew again.

  "The winner is Todd!" shouted the beadle, and the crowd erupted into cheers. Toby ducked into the cart, but could see Pirelli bidding Mr. Todd goodbye. He handed over the five quid, muttered something Toby couldn't hear, and came storming back into the cart, all shouts and flying fists. Just before Toby got a box on the ear, he could've sworn he saw the woman with the red hair-band glance pityingly back as she and Todd walked away.

  Pirelli didn't talk much for the rest of the day. But as Toby was stoking the small fire in their room for the night, he heard him mutter, "Sweeney Todd indeed. He'll regret the day he crossed me."