As the buggy sped along, I sneaked peeks at Mrs. Penn. She didn’t seem to be much of a talker, but I could tell that she was observing me. At one point, she said, “You can’t be much older than twenty-five.”
I was so incensed that she thought I was that old that without pausing to think about it, I blurted out that I was only twenty.
She smiled with such canniness that I realized I might have misjudged her. There was something in the look in her eyes at that point that made me think she was much wiser than I’d thought. She was a bit like Mr. Peters who had tested minute portions of herbs and chemicals to see what combinations reacted in a way that might be useful.
One of my house mothers, Grandma Stevens, had said that Mr. Peters would one day blow himself up doing that, but he never did. I think he was careful in what he was doing. He never explained the purpose of his experiments, but eventually, he became so learned that everyone in the village began to visit him for help with medical problems and miscellaneous questions like how to get rid of house mice.
Mrs. Penn didn’t have any chemicals or herbs with her, so I don’t know why I was comparing her to Mr. Peters. My mind just works strangely sometimes. But maybe it was because when everyone thought Mr. Peters was absolutely nuts, he was really smarter than they were. I was thinking that maybe that was true of Mrs. Penn.
The town was not far away, maybe a couple of miles, and the horse pulling our buggy clip-clopped along at a steady trot, while Frey, just as I’d said he would, although he was loose, remained right beside us. At times, he even stuck his nose through the window to see what I was up to. That made me nervous.
It would be horrid if Frey got his head stuck while we were moving forward. Each time he checked inside, I shooed him off, but he only nicker/whinnied as he pulled in his head, a sound I’d never heard another horse make, but which sounded exactly like a good-hearted chuckle.