Free Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown

to the handsome young American. That afternoon, in the huge, empty kitchen at Southend House, in an interview so brief and strangely elliptical that Vida walked around for days afterward feeling as though she might have been mistaken about the whole matter, she was hired as Manford’s nanny.
    One overcast morning two months later, Mr. Perry arrived at the port in Southampton with his personal effects and his infant son. His sister had made the passage with them and had been seasick the entire voyage, and she’d handed Manford over to Vida almost as soon as they alighted from the car in front of Southend. “Thank God you’re here,” she’d said. “I need a bath.”
    Vida, dressed carefully for the occasion in a white blouse and serge skirt, had been waiting nervously in the front hall for the sound of the approaching car. At Mr. Perry’s instructions, she had seen that the furniture shipped three weeks before was in place. That afternoon, she carried Manford to his new nursery, changed his nappy, and laid him down to rest in the Perrys’ heirloom cradle with its intricately turned spindles. Manford turned his heavy head gently from side to side, quietly restless. After a moment, regarding him solemnly, Vida took him in her arms again and carried him to the window. She held him up to see the view, and heblinked his eyes against the light, turning his face aside to nuzzle into her neck. As she held the warm, sweet weight of him against her, she contemplated the things that were his—the silver brush and comb engraved with his initials, the beautiful gardens below, the splendid house, the handsome father. And yet no mother, she thought, looking down at Manford in her arms. Rich as a lord, this baby, but yet so poor.
    â€œCome see,” she whispered. And she held him then to face the mirrored glass of the wardrobe doors. “I’m Vida,” she said to his sleepy face. “We say it this way: Vee-da. You must just sing right out whenever you need me.”
    Later, when they were certain he would never speak, she remembered with hot shame having given him that particular instruction. For Manford would never sing out—never sing, nor shout, nor even whisper.
    V IDA KEPT A photograph of Manford’s mother in a silver frame on the dresser in Manford’s room. Eleanor Perry had been blond and lovely, and as the years went by, Vida could see that Manford’s good looks came from his mother as much as from his father. But sometimes, in the beginning, looking at herself in the mirror, she thought she saw a likeness between her and the grave and silent child now under her charge and pretended he was her own. It was easy enough to do, really, with no
real
mother to confront her. She would hold Manford’s pudgy hands to the looking glass next to hers, where they left a moist and ghostly imprint. “Now you see it, now you don’t,” she said, and was rewarded one day by Manford’s first smile.
    Sometimes Vida turned around to catch sight of Thomas Perry standing silently in the door of the nursery, watching them. She would duck her head shyly—he was
so
handsome, his hair blackas a crow’s back, his nose so straight, his eyes so blue. But he always turned away after a moment. Before long he had begun to travel. Soon he was hardly ever at home.
    For the first few years, Southend House was maintained in perfect repair. Mr. Perry kept a horse in the stable and, for Manford, though he was too young to ride him, a shaggy Shetland pony (of whom Vida was secretly afraid). Water flowed in the fountains. The roses bloomed with magical profusion, their intricate, blameless faces opening wide and then falling away silently, petal by petal, onto the emerald grass.
    On her way to work in the mornings, when she still lived in her mother and father’s house, Vida would come up through the wood. At the big horse chestnut tree on the lane, she would stop and