King of Shadows by Susan Cooper Page A

he didn’t know was that I could in fact do better. I’d been good at gymnastics ever since I was very young; the phys ed teacher at my little grade school in Greenville had been a passionate gymnast and tai chi expert, and I’d been his prótegé, even after I’d gone on to junior high. We’d worked out a real show-off routine that had been the high point of my audition in front of Arby, when I was trying out for the Company of Boys. Four hundred years from now.
    Henry Condell shook his head, frowning. “This is not a contest,” he said. “Nathan has not worked on a display.”
    â€œBut there’s something I can do,” I said. “May I?”
    Roper laughed.
    Master Condell’s eyes flickered from one to the other of us. He didn’t really like this situation; he was a kind man. “Very well,” he said.
    So I got up on the stage, ungracefully, and I took a deep breath and I did my routine. It started with a double flip from standing, and it went on through some really phenomenal stuff, some of it made out of tai chi movements, to end with a triple back flip that I only just managed, because of having been sick. I wobbled a bit but I landed standing, hearing them gasp, and there was a tinysilence and then all the boys clapped. So did Master Condell.
    But not Roper. He just sat there.
    Henry Condell said to me, “Who taught thee?”
    I searched for a name Will Shakespeare had used. “Master Mulcaster,” I said.
    Condell’s eyebrows went up, and he looked at me with extreme skepticism. I looked back innocently, and he frowned uncertainly, and shook his head. “Richard Mulcaster’s tastes must have changed since last I had words with him,” he said.
    I suddenly remembered the other name. “And Will Kempe,” I said.
    Condell’s face cleared, and he laughed. “I had forgot thy connection,” he said. “Angry Will, who has stalked out, I hear, leaving me to find the money to buy his share in the company. Thy cousin, was he?”
    â€œWill Kempe was Nat’s mother’s cousin,” Harry said importantly. I had found him suddenly at my side after I did my show-off turn, though he hadn’t paid me too much attention before that.
    I said, “I have not seen him often this past year.” That was certainly true.
    â€œHe taught thee well,” Condell said. He was looking at me thoughtfully; I hoped he wasn’t going to ask about the tai chi.
    Inside the back of the theater, someone was ringing a handbell. Roper scrambled to his feet. “Our time is over, Master Condell.” For our different reasons, he and I were both glad of the interruption.
    The boy actors often had classes in the morning, I discovered—taught by whichever member of the companywas free and willing. After the tumbling class, Master Burbage came back and gave us a lesson in what the others seemed to call declamation, though I’d have described it just as verse speaking. Everyone had a prepared speech that they got up and delivered from the stage. Burbage went up to the very top gallery of the audience, and bellowed down criticisms from there. The worst crime was to be inaudible, though it seemed to me that most of the boys were trying too hard to be heard, and overacting horribly as a result. Master Burbage seemed to think so too. “Not so much!” he would yell down at them. “Not so much!”
    I didn’t recognize most of the speeches they did. They were pretty ranty and ravy, and I don’t think any of them was from Shakespeare. When it was my turn, I wanted to do the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, which I’d learned for my audition for Arby, but it occurred to me just in time that I didn’t know whether Shakespeare had written Hamlet yet, in 1599.
    I didn’t want to do a speech of Puck’s in case they thought that was the only thing in the world I knew by