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to be seen.
    John Heminges was a firm, broad-shouldered man with yellow hair turning sandy and a disposition to match his sunny coloring. He had a good head for business and could always be counted on to sound the voice of reason in any dispute. But at the moment he looked the opposite of reasonable, as he paced the width of the great room with one fist striking his palm over and over.
    By the time we arrived, he had worn a track in the floor rushes. “… no reward for all these years of training and oversight. You know I've tried to be fair—more than fair—as loving as to my own child. For the last year his behavior has grown more and more brazen, until this—” He could not, apparently, find words for
this
, so he threw up his hands. “It is not to be borne.”
    “Of course not,” Henry Condell said, in the soothing tone used to pacify lunatics. “We will set a fitting penalty in time.”
    “Penalty?” John Heminges stopped short. “What penalty but expulsion from the Company?”
    “John.” Master Condell reminded him, with a jerk of his head in our direction, that open ears were drinking in every word said. “That can be settled later. For now we have more pressing business.”
    “Then let us be off.” Master Heminges picked up his hat from the table and started toward the door with no pause, as though he had merely changed the angle of his pacing.
    Henry Condell turned to us. “You boys must walk to the Theater alone. Tell Master Burbage we'll be along in time for rehearsal—”
    “Nay.” John Heminges turned at the door, one hand on the latch. “Let them come. They should see this—Robin especially.” Then he was out the door, leaving us mystified. Our master looked from us to the empty doorway and back again, frowned, shrugged, shook his head. “Come along, then. We'lladd something to your education beyond stage deportment, eh?”
    So we followed them down Aldermanbury Street and on toward Cheapside, in an opposite direction from the one we usually took. Cheapside, the street that forms the spine of London, was filling already with water peddlers and tinsmiths, carters and housemaids on their way to market. And beggars of every description—sightless, legless, armless, hopeless—all wrapped up as well as they could afford against the morning chill. The gray dawn was made gloomier by the cries of the unfortunate: “A penny, sir. A penny for a poor soldier whose strength was spent in the Netherlands….” “A farthing, young master, to feed my gaunt-ribbed child!” “Pity a blind man, good people; pity the blind!” Add to these the singsong chants of peddlers hawking their wares and the church bells beginning to toll out seven o'clock, and it made a rackety way to greet the morning. Londoners are so accustomed to noise that they don't hear half of it, but I grew up in a country village, where dawn is gently roused by crowing cocks, rather than violently shaken with a thousand voices.
    The huge gray block of St. Paul's Cathedral loomed to our left as we veered off Cheapside toward Ludgate. All this time the hats and cloaks of our masters kept well ahead of us— sometimes we had to trot to keep them in view—and Robin the chatterer had kept strangely silent. We both knew that our expedition had somewhat to do with Kit, but beyond that,Robin was probably as ignorant as I. He and Kit had been close—as close as a lord with a faithful servant, or boy with his adoring hound. On warm nights they used to slip out after curfew to roam the streets of London, skirting danger while keeping out of real trouble. But those excursions had not resumed with the coming of spring this year, and though Robin never talked about it, I knew he was hurt. Kit often showed up at the Theater with the haggard face and dark-circled eyes that indicated he wasn't getting much sleep. Somehow we knew that he had not turned to a life of contemplation and study. “Some lady is keeping him up,” Gregory once suggested,