The Song of Seven

by Tonke Dragt

  “And so are ours,” said Maarten solemnly.

  A silence fell. Frans looked around the class. He suddenly had the feeling again that the children knew more than he did – that it was their story, not his.

  “Sir,” said Marian, breaking the silence, “will you send our best wishes to the magician too? And say hello to Geert-Jan from us?”

  “Yes, Geert-Jan too!” the rest of the class agreed.

  “And Roberto,” said Maarten.

  “And Jan Tooreloor,” said Arie, taking the pistol out of his pocket and looking at it.

  “And Aunt Wilhelmina and Miss Rosemary,” added Frans.

  “And Ivan!” said Marian with gleaming eyes. “He’ll be there too when you go to look for the treasure this afternoon, won’t he?”

  “What exactly are you imagining?” said their teacher. “That Geert-Jan the Treasure-hunter is going to set off on a search with Ivan the Terrible and Frans the Red, in and out of rooms, up and down stairs? No, no, no, Geert-Jan has to work, and if he doesn’t do it properly, he can write some more lines.”

  He thought back to the lines of verse again. How could the other conspirators be so certain that Count Gregorius’s Prophecy would come true?

  THAT WAS SIX and now for Part Seven

  7

  FRANS WONDERS ABOUT THE PROPHECY

  The tutor turns treasure-hunter

  THIS IS ONE

  On Wednesday afternoon Frans went on his bike to the House of Stairs, not via Sevenways, but along the normal road. When he reached the rear entrance and got off his bike, he found that the gate was locked. He gave it a few tugs, irritably wondering if he’d have to ride all the way round to the front entrance. Before he’d decided what to do, he heard a familiar sound; there was the old coach approaching along the drive. Had Count Grisenstein given Jan his job back? No, someone else was sitting up front; after a few moments, he recognized it was Manus. The man didn’t look very comfortable up there; he was desperately clinging to the reins and looking rather worried.

  Manus brought the coach to a stop just in front of the gate, and then he noticed Frans. “Oh, Mr Tutor, sir!” he said, jumping down from the coach. “How lucky that I happened to see you here. Now I can open the gate for you.” He spoke soothingly to the horse, gave the whole carriage a distrustful look, and then took a large key from his pocket. “I should have thought you might come from this direction,” he continued. “Now Berend’s waiting for you by the other gate for no good reason.” He let Frans in and looked at the coach again. “I was going for a practice drive,” he said apologetically. “The count wants to go out soon, but he’s fired the coachman. I don’t suppose you know why, do you?” He looked up at Frans with something sly in his expression.

  Frans shook his head and thought to himself that he didn’t like Manus very much.

  “It’s because his name was Tooreloor,” Manus went on in a muted voice. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No,” replied Frans, looking as surprised as he could. “No, it doesn’t mean anything to me!”

  The man patted the horse on the neck. “And I’m not going to say anything either,” he replied, “even though it’s me who’s the victim. There’s no new coachman to be found, and who has to deal with it again? Me! As if I don’t have enough to do already!” He looked sadly at Frans.

  Frans didn’t feel any sympathy for him at all, but he said in a friendly voice, “You’re something of a jack-of-all-trades, aren’t you?”

  Manus gave him a fake smile – at least that was how it seemed, although he had no reason to be unfriendly. “I’m going to turn the coach around and drive back now,” he said. “The count wants to leave at half past two. Would you like a lift? Oh, no, you’ve got your bike.” He came closer to Frans and added in a whisper, “Good luck with your lessons, Mr Tutor. If you can’t find the young gentleman, you should look for him in the Round Room.”

  Then he turned around, climbed up onto the coach and started moving. This was accompanied by lots of jolting and jerking and cries of “Giddy up!” and “Whoa!” and “Whoops!”

  Frans cycled up to the house. The back door was slightly open, but he still rang the bell. As he waited, he studied the rhyme on the lintel. He had plenty of time to do so, as it was a while before the housekeeper appeared.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she snapped. “Why are you standing out there? The door’s open.”

  “I thought it’d be a little impolite to come in uninvited…” began Frans.

  “Well, I think it’s impolite to make someone walk for miles for nothing,” said the housekeeper sourly. “It’s my afternoon off!” She let Frans in. “You know where you’re going,” she added briskly, and then she strode away.

  Frans headed for the library. He went up the stairs and down the stairs, wandering along corridors and through rooms before finally arriving at Gregorius’s Small Banqueting Hall, where he met Count Grisenstein, who, dressed in his hat and his coat, was sliding a pair of immaculate gloves onto his fingers.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Van der Steg,” he said. “I’m just off for a little trip into town. But I hope to see you later, when your lessons are finished. You’ll be staying for dinner, won’t you?”

  Frans accepted the invitation, although the prospect of the dinner itself wasn’t exactly pleasant.

  “My nephew is waiting for you in the library,” said the count. He bid Frans farewell and left.

  Finding the library wasn’t too difficult now for Frans, but when he got there the room was empty. That was disappointing; he hadn’t expected Geert-Jan to get up to his old tricks again. He walked over to the table – the boy wasn’t underneath it, but there were textbooks and notebooks on the table and a piece of paper propped up against the inkwell. I’m in the Round Room, Frans read in Geert-Jan’s handwriting.

  “So Manus was right,” he mumbled, as he tried to remember where the Round Room was. He looked at his watch; it was twenty-five past two.

  At twenty to three, he finally entered the room he was looking for. Geert-Jan was sitting where his uncle had been the last time, also studying a complex drawing. Ivan sat beside him, proudly enthroned on the desk. The boy looked up immediately; the cat showed no interest.

  “Hello, sir,” said Geert-Jan. “Look at this!”

  “No, I won’t look,” said Frans sternly. “You should be in the library.”

  “Didn’t you find my note?” asked Geert-Jan.

  “Yes, I did,” said Frans, “and Manus also said I’d find you here. But that’s not the arrangement; you’re supposed to have your lessons in the library. Children at school aren’t allowed to arrive late to their lessons either.”

  “Manus?” said Geert-Jan, ignoring Frans’s last words. “I told you he’s a spy! But he’s gone now. I just saw the coach heading out of the driveway; he was sitting up front and Uncle Gradus was inside.” He gave Frans a gleeful grin and said in a confidential tone, “So now we have the whole place to ourselves! Selina won’t move an inch unless she’s called, and Berend’s patrolling outside.”

  “And we have work to do inside,” began Frans. “In the library…”

  “Yes, but I just had to show you this!” said Geert-Jan, placing an index finger on the drawing. “It’s the map of the House of Stairs.”

  “How did you get hold of that?” asked Frans, interested in spite of himself.

  “It belongs to me, but it disappeared one day. Not really, of course. Uncle Gradus stole it.”

  Frans frowned, but didn’t say anything.

  “Ivan showed me where it was,” Geert-Jan continued. “But obviously Uncle Gradus doesn’t know that. The map was in his desk drawer. Just look!”

  Frans glanced at the cat, who was sitting, large and regal, beside the map. Then he looked at the map itself – he’d never seen anything so complicated before; his student must be very bright to make sense of it. “Geert-Jan,” he said, “I don’t approve of you poking around inside your uncle’s desk. Put the map away an
d come with me.”

  “But a map’s not secret!” said Geert-Jan. “Besides, it’s my map, and this house is my house. I’ll put it back soon, sir. I promise. But please just take a look at it first!”

  Frans remembered how the count had tried to deceive him: “Unfortunately I don’t have a map…” and he did as his student asked.

  “This is the Round Room, where we are now,” said Geert-Jan, pointing.

  Frans saw that the drawing was made up of more than one map, because, of course, the House of Stairs had many, many floors. He could see the library and the Small Banqueting Hall and he discovered that there was indeed a large banqueting hall too. The “Great Banqueting Hall” was completely dilapidated though, Geert-Jan said, and no longer in use.

  “Do you see anything unusual?” the boy asked in a whisper. He quickly tapped various points on the map.

  “Yes,” said Frans. “I can see little crosses, drawn in pencil…”

  “Those are the places where we searched, Uncle Gradus and I, when we’d just moved in,” Geert-Jan told him. “But he’s also put crosses by places where I’ve looked on my own! So now do you believe that he’s spying on me?”

  They stared at each other. Frans felt rather uneasy. He was becoming more and more convinced that Count Gradus was in fact after the treasure. That made the House of Stairs seem less and less like a mysterious mansion in a grimly gripping tale – it was turning into an unpleasant reality, a place that could prove dangerous for a ten-year-old boy…

  Not that Geert-Jan looked at all scared. He was actually smiling when he said, “All those crosses to show where the treasure isn’t! Great!” Thoughtfully, he added, “And I’ll still need to search a lot of the places with crosses again…” He looked at Frans. “We can do it together, sir!”

  Frans didn’t reply; he had no idea what to say.

  “It’s in the Sealed Parchment,” whispered Geert-Jan. “One alone will never find me…” He folded the map and put it back in the drawer. “Let’s start right away!” he said eagerly.

  “Listen,” said Frans, “I came here to teach you, not to play games with you!”

  “Games?” repeated Geert-Jan with an indignant howl. The cat jumped down from the desk and wound around his legs. “You have to help me!” the boy continued. “There’s no one else who can do it. I have Ivan, of course, but he only wants to look when he’s in the mood, and most of the time he’s not in the mood… Please, sir,” he begged. “We might never have another chance like this afternoon! No one will be spying on us! Go on, please! Before Uncle Gradus gets home…”

  He walked over to a low door behind the desk, which Frans hadn’t noticed before. When he opened it, Frans could see a dark space behind, and a metal ladder.

  “The steps will show you where to go…” muttered Frans. “How many staircases and ladders are there in this building?”

  “I’ve never counted them,” replied Geert-Jan. “Shall we, sir?”

  “A ladder and a black cat,” said Frans. “Fortunately it’s not Friday, but Wednesday, and not the thirteenth but the seventh… Fine, Frans the Red is at your disposal.”

  The boy clapped his hands. “I am Geert-Jan the Treasure-hunter,” he said. “Follow me, Frans the Red. Guard us, Ivan the Terrible! We’re going on an expedition.”

  More than two hours later, Frans and Geert-Jan returned to the library; they both dropped into armchairs and sighed. Ivan was no longer with them. He’d left them after just an hour – probably to stand guard by the front door.

  Frans lit a cigarette and brushed the cobwebs out of his hair.

  Geert-Jan wiped his dirty face with his dirty hand and said, “Well, at least we know this much: the treasure is not above the Round Room, or under the Hexagonal Room, and not in the attic above the Small Banqueting Hall, and not…”

  “I’d rather know where it is than where it isn’t,” said his tutor. He frowned when he thought about even more challenging expeditions that might be in store for him. The climbing so far hadn’t been too bad, but…

  “Next time we’ll check out all of the fire escapes,” Geert-Jan went on. “There are only four of them…”

  “The fire escapes can’t be any older than sixty years or there-abouts,” said Frans, “so we can ignore them.”

  “Why?” asked Geert-Jan.

  “Count Gregorius lived two hundred years ago,” Frans explained. “The fire escapes weren’t there when he wrote his prophecies.”

  “But prophecies are predictions, aren’t they?” said Geert-Jan. “Count Gregorius could see into the future. So we can’t leave out the fire escapes.”

  “If we’re going to ‘scale the heights’ and ‘head down below’, we really can’t leave out even one single stair, can we?” said Frans gloomily. “Any of the steps in this house might show us where to go. That’s what Mr Thomtidom said.”

  “Who’s Mr Thomtidom?” asked Geert-Jan.

  “Don’t you know? He’s a magician… or at least he claims to be.”

  “The magician!” said Geert-Jan. “Roberto’s told me about him. Do you know him? Did he… Did he send you to me?”

  “A lot of people sent me to you,” replied Frans. “But I actually came here of my own free will. In response to your uncle’s advertisement.” He struggled out of his chair and said with a sigh, “And what exactly have I taught you this afternoon? Not even how to read a map, because you could already do that.” He gave his student a long, hard stare and then said, “Your face could do with a wash.”

  “So could yours, sir,” said Geert-Jan.

  “This is ridiculous!” said Frans. “I’m a schoolmaster and a tutor, not a treasure-hunter.”

  Geert-Jan frowned thoughtfully and muttered something to himself.

  “What are you saying?” asked Frans.

  “The lines of the poem,” replied Geert-Jan. “There’s a lot more to it than the steps. All the Children must be your Friends, if you are to beat the Foe…”

  “Well, the children in my class certainly consider themselves your friends,” said Frans. “They all told me to say hello, by the way.”

  Geert-Jan’s eyes gleamed. “That’s nice,” he whispered.

  From somewhere in the house came the sound of footsteps slowly approaching.

  “Come along!” said Frans. “First let’s wash our faces and then we’ll do some work. I mean schoolwork this time, some grammar and arithmetic…”

  Not very much schoolwork was done though, that Wednesday afternoon. It was late by then and both the tutor and his student were both tired.

  The children in Frans’s class were a little jealous when he told them that the next day.

  “That Geert-Jan’s so lucky,” muttered Maarten, saying what all his classmates were thinking.

  Frans looked serious and shook his head.

  His thoughts had taken him back to the House of Stairs. He was remembering his dinner in the gloomy dining room, with Count Grisenstein, whom he didn’t trust, and Geert-Jan, who had withdrawn into a sulky silence again. After dinner, Selina had appeared. She was in a terrible mood, so Frans had offered to put Geert-Jan to bed. The housekeeper had given an unfriendly sniff; Count Grisenstein had spoken in an icy tone about spoilt little boys who were a burden to others and to themselves; and Geert-Jan had haughtily remarked that he was old enough to put himself to bed. Frans hadn’t taken it to heart though.

  Now he could see Geert-Jan’s bedroom again, which was far too big and grandly furnished – the four-poster bed, the old-fashioned paintings on the wall… But two very different pictures hung on the wall at the foot of the bed: photographs of Geert-Jan’s dead parents. He remembered how the boy, suddenly confiding in him again, had shown him something: a small gauze bag, filled with dried herbs. “Take a sniff,” he’d whispered. “I got it from Aunt Rosemary. She secretly gave it to Jan the Coachman. She picked them in her garden, just for me…” He kept the little gauze bag under his pillow, as if it were as precious as the treasure he was seeking.<
br />
  But Frans didn’t tell that part to the class. He just said, “You really shouldn’t feel jealous of Geert-Jan. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’s missing out on so many things that you have. Try to imagine how you’d feel if you were in his shoes, and then maybe you’ll understand.”

  He does some teaching and risks his life

  THIS IS TWO

  On Saturday mornings, Mr Van der Steg the schoolteacher always made his students write an essay. This time Marian put up her hand and asked if she could write a letter. Letters and essays were almost the same thing anyway, she said.

  Frans agreed and asked if she wanted to send her letter to a real person.

  Marian looked at him almost reproachfully. “Of course, sir,” she said. “I’m writing to Geert-Jan.”

  Frans smiled. “That’s very kind of you,” he replied.

  “A letter to Geert-Jan!” said Maarten, sounding a bit grumpy because he hadn’t thought of it first. “That’s what I was going to do too, sir.”

  Then all the children wanted to write to the boy in the House of Stairs. Frans said they could, but he did give them a few instructions. “You have to write as neatly as you do in your exercise books,” he said, “and the letter must be the same length as an essay, at least one and a half pages.”

  The class had never worked so keenly before. At the end of the morning, Frans collected all the sheets of paper and put them in a big yellow envelope. It was only then that he realized he couldn’t mark the letters. He couldn’t even read them, as he believed that it was wrong to look at letters that are meant for other people.

  That afternoon he cycled back to the Grisensteins’ house, struggling to pedal through wind and rain. Autumn had really set in now; Mr Thomtidom and Roberto would have to pack up their tents for a few months, and the last flowers in Rosemary’s garden would soon be wilted and bedraggled.