Mutch was a hard man.

He drove all of the stable workers very hard, male or (in my case) female. Any slacking was met with a tap of the whip and a threat of a beating or telling Master Fitch. He was particularly hard on me, and every time he looked at me I saw hatred in his eyes. I had done nothing that I knew to displease him, and he still stared at me all day, and struck me harder than the rest for taking a brief break when pitching hay, or for leading horses to the wrong place.

I took to avoiding his eyes, and I searched for viewings that might help me know what he might do to me in the future, on the smallest excuse, but never once did I see anything around his blocky, square-jawed head. When he caught me staring at him, he would stump over, whacking his horse whip on his hand. "What are you looking at, girl?"

"Nothing, sir," I hastened to assure him, and would hurry back to my work without looking back at him. I tried telling Master Fitch about him and the way he treated his workers, but he just shook his head and told me that Mutch had a right to deal with the stableboys – and girl, he added with a glance at me – as he wished to. Meanwhile, the fire flickered around him most times, and I shivered violently at the sight of it. Of course, he couldn't feel it, but it was horrifying, talking to him like that. Eventually I took to avoiding him, too.

I had begun to develop into a woman, and I didn't like it very much. However, I did enjoy the stableboys' astonished looks as I took to wearing looser blouses to give room for my growing chest, belted at the waist to accentuate my slender frame. At first I hardly realized either attribute of this style – it was only practicality - but I began to enjoy the staring eyes as the stableboys finally realized that I was female.

I almost never flirted with them, but I did tease them quite a lot, as I recall. There was one boy who was particularly interested in me, and continually brought me flowers, much to the other's amusement, and jealousy, when I began to pay attention to him. I would walk around the street outside the inn on his arm when we had off time in the mornings, those rare days, and occasionally gave him a few kisses to encourage him and keep him from giving up.

It all came to a head when Mutch caught me kissing the stableboy in the hayloft – oh, not much more than kissing, but enough for Mutch to take the whole fiasco to Fitch. He had come to view me as a daughter, and I remember standing in front of his desk with the boy staring at the ground and blushing next to me, and Mutch in a corner with arms crossed and an expression of satisfaction of his face.

"Min, were this stableboy's attention's unwanted?" Fitch asked, looking almost as embarrassed as the boy next to me.

"No," I said, after a brief glance at the boy.

Fitch coughed, and the red in his cheeks deepened. "Where you supposed to be working at the time that Mutch…er…found you and him together?"

I was rather amused by Fitch's embarrassment. "No, sir. It was an off time."

"Well then…ah…Min, I wish to speak to you alone. Mutch, lad, you may go. I'll speak to you later," he told the stableboy. After they left, he turned to me again. "What exactly…." Fitch blushed even more here, "What were you doing in the hayloft, miss? With the boy?"

I shrugged. "Oh, just a couple of kisses. Nothing really indecent, Master Fitch."

Fitch's face was now a deep shade of purple. "Well…there are a few things… I should probably explain to you…" I listened attentively as he stumbled through, or tried to, an explanation of why I should not be dallying with the stableboys, and other such things, and his face got redder and redder as he went along. At last I stopped him before he fainted altogether.

"Master Fitch, my aunt told me all of this, before she died. You needn't continue embarrassing yourself on my account."

He flushed and scowled fiercely at me. "Well. Go along, then. And don't spend time with any more stableboys!" he called after my retreating back.

Unfortunately, the hapless lad was fired, as in the investigation of him it was found that he was stealing money. But that part of the story didn't get out, and the other boys avoided me as though I had the plague ever after.