The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

She nodded happily at the urchin Bellingham, who scooted sideways into the hallway to make himself scarce. She even smiled at the “bootblack boy” who had always seemed to have a screw loose. But her eyes followed the gloriously erect form of Count Balásházy as he almost vanished into the steamy vault, lit by plumes of heavenly light from above.

  She’d tried to deny how much she missed him. Ashamed by the revelation of her relationship with Boneaux, she’d cringed and hid inside of her work, foraging in the forest for the aye-aye she’d been told was there. Instead, she’d found sodden canopies of umbrella plants larger than elephant’s ears, dripping on her while she cowered with a flambeau torch that she prevented from going out by holding a tin can over it. It was misery, pure and complete.

  His imperious voice came from a marble enclave. “When I was in the Mauritius, I took your aye-aye plan to the director of Pamplemousses. He’s very much looking forward to receiving a specimen.”

  Oh, was that all she was good for? Specimens? Crunching her face into a mask of skepticism, Dagny advanced into the Turkish bath. Tomaj leaned back against a marble table, toying with an opium pipe! “I have news that tides well. I’m sure I can deliver your specimen within the fortnight.”

  Why was he gazing at her with that expression, like he’d just been well fucked? He probably had been! “Malala. Come here.” He patted his thigh, beckoning.

  Oh. I’m really a whore now. I might as well … seeing as how I already prostitute myself to someone else, and for much less money. But life could be worse. I could be back in New York City.

  Affixing a smile to her face, Dagny came forward. She so wanted to be near him. “I’m sorry that I’m not the person you wish I was. I cannot help it—I take care of my family. It’s what my father instructed me to do. If you hate me now, I don’t blame you.”

  “We all have to do what we can to survive. I don’t hate you. I love you.”

  Dagny laughed. “Love? What is that, anyway, but a whole lot of hot gas … Sal says that we were all born spirits, learning how to become human beings. But our spirits got shattered into a zillion pieces—they call it ‘a wound’—which formed two sides. One side is called the heart. It’s loving, gentle, kind, generous, yet impotent. The other side is called the Black Picture. It’s angry, vengeful, jealous, and powerful. Sometimes I see you, and … all I see is a Black Picture.”

  Tomaj cocked an eyebrow. “I’d like to think I’m the other side. But Sal is wise, so I’m forced to agree with you.”

  “Where are my orchids?”

  The count looked at the floor tiles. “I’ve arranged an expedition down to Fort Dauphin. There are sifaka there, a species of lemur you might want to study.” He turned his face back to Dagny, and he was happy now. “Will you come with me? Sal can come along as well, but I can’t extend the same invitation to Zeke.”

  “That’s fine, Zeke needs to stay here, to arrange for his chop-house. Besides, now you’ve broken his finger and, it looks like, his nose.” She dared approach a bit closer to where he perched so elegantly. “Sifaka? Yes, they’re cunning, resembling small fluffy bears. I’ve seen many in the forests near my cottage, leaping from tree to tree, and drinking from the cisterns of the traveler’s tree. Beautiful creatures, with a golden orange on the arms and legs. They quite stare at you with a look of sagacity.”

  “Yes, but this is a different sort. I had thought you might be intrigued by their unique character.”

  “Unique character …? I should like to go along. If you don’t find me too repulsive, that is. Perhaps you don’t want to be seen with the lover of Monsieur Boneaux.”

  Tomaj looked thoughtfully at her. She was terrified to death of his response. “If I had my way, which I very often don’t in this life, I would prefer that you not sleep with that louse, that you not allow him to kiss you, or even to visit his house. I’m jealous like the Black Picture. But since women are headstrong creatures, I have no voice in the matter.”

  Dagny didn’t know what to say—Paul had not called for her to come to the House of the Diabolical Monkeys after his disastrous visit to her cottage. Now that gossip was rife about their ménage, he was apparently afraid of tipping off Suzanne or business associates. Or, worse … senior wife Ramavo. He had continued to send money to Dagny by way of his man Sodra.

  She stepped even closer to the count, until she could feel the steam rising from his chest. “Tomaj. I didn’t come here just to see about my orchids, or to protect my overzealous brother. I came here because I have a deep attraction to you. I’ve had the blue devils since the night of the ball, and I’m afraid that my humors are now so entirely out of balance that I have not had the heartiness to eat a single mouthful of food.”

  There, a shadow of concern came over his face, and he lifted one hand, laying it heavily upon her hip. “Ah, no, that won’t do, my malala. I won’t have you reducing this figure of Aphrodite to a skeleton … I’ve been at sixes and sevens without you, which is why I’m stealing you away to Fort Dauphin.” His other hand hovered between her breasts above an emerald and marcasite pendant Sal had given her. Dagny closed her eyes with the painful bliss of his touch. She was happy, so happy with him. “Come with me, and I’ll keep you fed on all the plum-duff that a New York bootblack can make.”

  “Ah.” She smiled, and with her fingertips touched his cheekbone, as creamy as Nova Scotian apophyllite. “You make me so weak with joy, I quite fear I will be overcome with onanism … my weaker female nerves make the loss of fluid much more dangerous than for men, and I fear I’ll be in the grips of nymphomania if I’m not forced to stop.”

  Tomaj laughed. He laughed! Here she was, fully frank in her admission of secret feminine practices, and he laughed! He looked ravishing in the rare act of unbridled merriment, his eyes mere slits of glimmering dancing mirth, but Dagny seethed with shame, and therefore anger. She had been about to kiss him! “Do you mean to say you’ve been frigging your delectable clit?”

  Huffy, she withdrew, and hugged herself tightly, although his Hungarian lilt made her want to laugh, as well. “Why, yes! I’ve been trying to duplicate the sensation you created when you kissed me at Sergeant Townshend’s ball! It’s quite wrong of me, I know, and I know it will only lead to hysteria, and jaundice, and—”

  Gripping her wrist, Tomaj stood languidly, giving her a full view of the proud marquee his penis created in the lap of his dressing gown. “My dear, my dear. Where do you get these outrageous antiquated ideas? I can honestly say I have never once seen a woman who was driven to these diseased lengths by frigging herself, and I have fucked them all, from the belles of Pest-Buda and Vienna to the mademoiselles of Île Sainte-Marie!”

  “Why … It’s well known that if one continues this activity, it leads to a pronounced tendency to turn to one’s own sex for erotic satisfaction!”

  Tomaj stilled, regarding her with distant amusement, his raised hand barely grazing her jawbone. “Ah …” he muttered. “That would indeed be a tragedy for a woman of such responsive appetite.”

  A faint knocking came.

  “Um … excuse me … I just need some medicine for Ezekiel from my knapsack,” Sal whispered, wafting through beacons of sun. “I’m glad to hear you’re having a good time.”

  “But of course,” declared Tomaj grandly, holding Dagny in the manner of the Viennese waltz. “What man wouldn’t, alone in a bath-house with a nymphomaniac?”

  Slack-jawed at first, Sal soon relaxed as he swept up his knapsack from the tiles. “Oh, I’ve got medicine for that, too.”

  Dagny despaired of the two men. “You’re not a medicine man, remember, Sal? You’re a farmer—you only plant seeds in our hearts. It’s our job to nurture them, to make them grow.”

  “Yes.” Sal nodded. “To learn to become a human being again.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE UPSIDE DOWN DESERT

  South of Fort Dauphin, Madagascar

  CAPTAIN, ONE OF THE MEN HAS TOLD ME THERE EXists here a lizard with three eyes.”
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  Smiling, Tomaj turned to face Dagny, the only passenger bold enough to enter the quarterdeck. She had lately enjoyed calling him “Captain” at every possible convenience, so he was imbued with happiness. “Ah. My malala, those waisters are merely pantaloons. Don’t believe a word they say.”

  He had brought the waisters and several hard cases on an innocuous cruise as like this, as he’d had to leave all the able hands such as Youx and Zaleski behind in Mavasarona Bay, with Stormalong as guardship. Not much could happen on a joy cruise in a converted merchant snow like the Bombay Oyster Tomaj had selected, especially wearing a Dutch ensign as she was. She was copper-hulled, too, against teredo and barnacles, with newly built cabins of mahogany, and the deck had been raised so one didn’t have to stoop below. “I assure you, there’s no such thing as a three-eyed lizard. Or if there was, it’s as extinct as your dodo.”

  They had doubled a cape into five fathoms of shoaling water in a fine fairway, a bay Tomaj often moored in. He brought up the Oyster in a channel that bristled with enticing golden cat’s paws where twisted black shipwrecks broke the waves. Tomaj looked down fondly at the lusty naturalist, keeping one eye on the lowering of the longboat, a sound two-masted rig of seven oars, where hands conglomerated in the hopes one might be accidentally shoved overboard, forced into a refreshing swim among the angelfish.

  Dagny’s radiant face had colored an even deeper brown during the three days at sea, and Tomaj struggled mightily to keep his hands off her. She eschewed her customary vibrating headgear for a simple straw bonnet trimmed with silk roses, and her polka-dotted calico gown fell just shy of her ankle, as befitted the stifling November heat of the South.

  She blinked. “Why, Captain. The man who told me that was in Fort Flacourt. He should know the area, after all.”

  Leaning an elbow casually on the rail, Tomaj ran his fingertips along the telescope he held. He’d known he shouldn’t have allowed Dagny ashore at Fort Flacourt, resurrected from the ashes of French colonists who’d been wiped out 150 years ago by “the People of the Islands,” fighting over women. With the arrival of a ship of French orphans, girls between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, the men of the French East India Company sent their Malagasy wives back to their families. The Malagasy besieged their stockade for over a year until thirty Frogs and one orphan bride were rescued. Nauseating picaroons of the same ilk now inhabited the area. These one-eyed outcast Frogs, who could barely speak for all the teeth rotting in their head, took advantage of the one coast Radama hadn’t been able to bring into the fold, and traded for piddling head money whatever bony slaves the baggalas and sambuks brought.

  Dagny imagined in Fort Flacourt she could find a sort of “reticulated” tortoise. Her naturalist fervor aroused Tomaj, so he had not denied her request to go ashore.

  “Miss Ravenhurst, I wouldn’t take the word of any Fort Flacourt man, either. You can ask any hand—Broadhecker, Bellingham, Frost, or Firebrand—who has been in these waters for ten years. But if you believe there’s a three-eyed lizard, I’ll be glad to humor you. You’ll be in the first longboat party going up the indraft there”—he pointed with his free hand—”so make certain you’ve packed all of your equipment. No more than two cases; we have little room underneath the thwarts.”

  “Oh, Captain.” He’d never known her to part her lips in that seductive manner. She took a stumbling step toward him, startled by the work of several sloppy reefers in the tops; he reached out to steady her by the shoulders. “I do hope you’ll be in the same party.”

  Fuck me dry, he almost breathed aloud. He was supposed to be the god-damned captain, and all he could do at night, when he should be gauging the anemometer, was hump his own goddamned hand. He’d brought no afyuni, as he wanted to appear to be the Emir-el-Bahr of his own ship and not some damned half-witted scum of the mud of hell. But as the wind freshened and the timbers creaked, the decades spent lying abed alone, floating above the nefarious depths of some vast mercurial continent of water, finally affected his brain. Everything salty, frowzy, reeking of cook smoke from Slushy’s galley, every new coast resembling all those before it, the same expanses of fetid mangrove swamps …

  She was behind a bulkhead, writing in her notebook, cataloguing her specimens. She said it was a shame collectors made scarce notes of habitat, behavior, and locality when recovering specimens, so she was notorious about “taxonomy.” That way, whoever described and archived it back in America or Europe might stand a chance of getting it right.

  He couldn’t touch her—she belonged to another. He loved her too much to be a party to criminal conversation. If he cared not for her, he’d be tail-wagging her up against the capstan.

  The past two nights, unable to sleep, he’d stood more middle watches than in the past five years.

  “Anchor’s a-cockbill at the cathead, sir!”

  Tomaj smiled down fondly at the spry boy. “Very good, Mister Bellingham.” Whatever is young Bellingham’s given name? Tomaj could not remember. I really should spend more time with the boy, studying his Sheet Anchor with him … it’s about time he started reading Horsburgh. He’s come in through the hawse holes, and spends more time with Zaleski. “Stow some grappling hooks for use as anchors. Have a carronade mounted in the boat. Tell Smit to set the jack-staff.”

  “With the Hollander flag, sir?”

  Tomaj smiled slyly. “That would be the best, yes.”

  Dagny surprised Tomaj by inserting, “And shall Bellingham be in the first party, as well? I should like that. He’s ever so interested in nature—he told me he wants to draw, like you.”

  Bellingham relaxed and swelled with pride, his fair-skinned face reddening.

  “Why …” Tomaj drawled slowly, so as to playfully torture the youth. Both Dagny and Bellingham didn’t dare breathe, each leaning slightly into Tomaj like raked masts. “That’d be possible, if you are the caretaker of my Bristol board and case of graphites, and sit with the rest of the bowmen.”

  Their joy was palpable, and Bellingham and Dagny clutched each other, the boy’s ruffled head engulfed in her bosom. Salvatore entered the quarterdeck, followed by a romping Stormalong, fur rippling with happiness as though she galloped along an ice floe.

  Tomaj shoved Bellingham in the shoulder. The boy reluctantly withdrew from the sheltering bosom. “Along with you, and tell Stephen Miller to bring his guitar; see to it no one bangs up my fiddle.”

  “A little bit of the ol’ ‘Dollar and a Half a Day’!” the ragamuffin bleated, colliding athwart the large dog in his haste to leave the quarterdeck.

  Dodging them, Sal said, “A fellow just told me of a—well, it sounds like a quartz pegmatite to me. He said it was in an area of ‘spiny forest,’ whatever that means. Look, he gave me this!” Sal spoke to Tomaj, but he shoved the rock into Dagny’s hand. “If I had a minute to break this open, I’m convinced it’d contain tourmaline. Do you know? About this spiny forest?”

  Tomaj herded them off the quarterdeck, daring to place his free hand on the back of Dagny’s neck as she held the rock up to the sky for inspection. Being out-of-doors agreed with her, and she had not complained once of seasickness, or of the heat that generally brought about headaches in white women. Tomaj ducked low to speak only to Sal. “Yes, I know about it. That’s where we’re going. We’re going to tack upstream about ten miles, so get all of your—”

  “My goniometer!” Sal cried. “Though one of its arms is broken …”

  Broadhecker commanded men lowering the longboat, and indeed a few men had seen fit to “fall” into the water, there to frolic in the warm swells of the austral reef. Broadhecker already had Dagny’s cases lined up on the deck, and men at special attention prepared to stow them. Hmm, that Broadhecker. Perhaps a bit too attentive. Tomaj slung an arm across Sal’s shoulders and cinched the geologist’s face close to his neck.

  “My dove.” He’d heard Dagny call Sal that. “This journey is for Dagny, so she may see unlimited natural wonders. But if we happen upon some rocks
along the way …”

  “For Dagny, yes,” Sal agreed. “She needs to discover things. Might there be celestine here?”

  Tomaj chuckled and released the man in order to direct Stephen Miller where to stow his guitar. “No,” he said ambiguously. “Not around here.”

  He said nothing more until they were underway up the hot shallow river where orange-faced hawks flew with angry snakes dangling from their mouths, and lemurs with rings around their tails waltzed on the shore.

  “There’s monazite in here,” Sal said to a handful of sand as he sat bestride the main thwart between two oarsmen.

  “Is that useful?” Dagny looked through a special strong glass Tomaj loaned her. Ahead, the river cleaved between two sheer halves of tamarind forest cliff, sailing into a primeval world of pterodactyls, where birds two stories tall would pluck them from their civilized seats.

  “Not much,” Sal said, sifting the sand between his palms into a funnel. “But it indicates a place where diamonds or sapphires might be found.”

  The littoral teemed with the feathery movements of hundreds of palmy Jurassic circinalis, brought from Madagascar to Kew by the botanist du Petit-Thouars. The telltale, bluish new leaves tipped their glorious lacy fronds, shedding their tomentum in the breeze.

  “I’ve been wondering,” Dagny mused, lowering the glass to her lap. “These coralline rocky reefs that we glide over. They rise from hundreds of feet beneath the sea, but the animals that build them live only near the surface, near the sun. How do they build from the surface down?”

  Sal raised a squinty eye at her. He was happier than she’d seen him in months, perhaps years, at last having a proper scientific expedition with the proper equipment, instead of having to himself haul cumbersome loads up hill and down dale. “You’d best watch out, sister. You’re starting to sound entirely too geological.”

  “Oh, no. Rocks are your vocation. I was just musing, that’s all. I pondered this quite a bit when Captain Balásházy was away in the Mauritius, perhaps at the same time you had your asgina dream. When you thought I was searching for aye-ayes, oftentimes I was really walking the shores of Mavasarona Bay, and I thought… if land can rise over a great period of time, as you always inform me, why can’t it also sink? Let’s say the coral reef started out in shallow water, built by the surface creatures, and the floor of the sea were to sink? The reef would grow up so as to stay near the sun.”