“This is unprecedented. Why, this egg looks like the equivalent of two hundred chicken’s eggs. My mind is a chaos of delights, with all of these wonders of the natural world. You have … you’ve given me so much, Tomaj. You have arranged this excursion, well, for a diversion for your men, but I know it was also to show me the beauties of your adopted homeland. For this I owe you my deepest gratitude. You have shown me and my family—well, Sal and I, at any rate—nothing but the kindest generosity … Still, I have been in my cabin with my clinometer, and I have placed every possible table into my cabin at every conceivable angle and direction, and I believe I’ve measured them as well as any geologist can do, and still I crave … Oh, Tomaj!”
She looked up at him again. He held what looked, oddly enough, like a chocolate bon-bon that he regarded with an arch sauciness, his nostrils flaring seductively, as though he hadn’t been listening to her. Lifting the chocolate to his lips, he looked straight at her without batting an eyelash, the sad tourmaline of his irises boring into her with particular intensity.
She leapt to her feet, touching her fingertips to his bare chest. “Tomaj! I have not been able to bear—oh, my.”
Disinterestedly, Tomaj pressed the chocolate to his mouth and took the gentlest bite, like pressing a bee between his teeth. He swallowed the outer shell without chewing, then reached his tongue out like a chameleon, expertly extracting a succulent blob of fig-pink filling. Dagny was mesmerized with the dainty cherry hovering on the tip of his talented tongue. He flicked and wiggled it, all the while staring at her from under those velvety lashes, and when he drew the cherry into his mouth and crushed it, she lost all reason.
Standing on tiptoe, she spoke hurriedly against his mouth. “Tomaj, I can’t bear being close to you, and to have you act like a remote acquaintance of mine, which I do not feel for you. I feel I’ve known you forever. I cannot bear it if you’re to treat me like a coat stand in the corner of the room!”
He seemed to withhold himself for a fraction of a second. His hands hovered over her shoulders, and he finally blinked and breathed, a sheen of moisture appearing on his forehead.
Dagny continued, “I cannot help it that I met Boneaux before I met you. Had I known you first, I never would have made a bargain with him. I would have fought to get you into my bed with all the powers at my behest, and not merely to save my family!” She realized she was nearly sobbing now, but it didn’t seem to matter, with the raucous shindy going on above deck. “I would have fought for you with tooth and claw and every weapon at my side, because I love you, Tomaj. I want to soothe you, to bring out the joy I know you still have in your hardened heart, and you drive me to distraction with your exquisite ways.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, and with irritation she brushed it off with her fingers before snaking her hand round the back of his damp, hot neck. “I shall get you your damned aye-aye,” she growled. “I know exactly where to find it, and what methods to use. But only if you promise me, right here and now, to give me prior payment for exactly half of that damned ugly fox-bat-squirrel thing, or I will fling myself off your bow and you will never see me again.”
I simply must shut up. She panted so heavily that translucent orbs swam before her eyes.
“I shall go … to the till,” Tomaj muttered.
What? The till? No, no, no … “Tomaj.” Dagny lifted a foot off the deck, inclining her pelvis up his body so that the ridge of his stiffened penis was hot against her mons veneris, inching her slipper up his thigh until she felt the solidity of the tabletop. As she commenced a light rocking of her pelvis, she whispered against his mouth, “I don’t want your damned money, you half-witted scum of the mud of hell. I want only you, for you are the prince … who has come for me.”
Exhaling all at once a bottled tension that scared her, Tomaj bent at the knees and gripped her around both thighs. Lifting her with her fingers entwined at the back of his neck, he walked with her, their noses touching. Giving her a little shove of his hips, he lifted her onto a hard surface that felt like metal under her behind, her thighs tightly locked around him.
“Dagny,” he breathed, lifting a hand to the brooch between her breasts. He flicked it away with merely a motion of his thumb, and it rolled to the carpet. “I cannot make love to the lover of my rival. There’s danger enough for you without putting you—” It seemed then he didn’t want to mention Boneaux, for he went on a different tack. “I’ve loved you since the moment I pulled you out of the drink. I want to protect you. I want to keep you and Sal close to me at all times. I never want you out of my sight, but I cannot…”
The yellow ribbons over her shoulders fluttered between his nimble fingers that now found the other brooch snug between her thighs. In his undoing of it he brushed his fingers against the bulging lips of her quim, and she fairly bolted into his lap, her thighs like a vise around his hips.
“Ah.” His voice was choked, his lambent eyes slid shut, and he tossed away the second brooch, laying both sides of the tulip overskirt asunder. “Dagny, I cannot…”
She grabbed a handful of his thick pigtail. “Yes, you can!” she whispered fiercely. Oh, the first time in her life she’d begged a man, and he had to act so moral! She was nearly screaming from wanting to crawl out of her skin!
Suddenly, he was gone. Dagny nearly bowled forward onto the tips of her toes, only to find her hands slapping up against his shoulders. Shoulders? He was on the deck on his knees, frantically gathering her skirts, slipping his hot fingers beneath her garters and drawing them down over her tingling kneecaps, and, oh when his velvety hair brushed against her, the steamy moisture of his panting against her clammy thigh, she cried aloud. “Oh!” The tip of his erotic hawk’s nose pressed against her undefiled thigh. She dug her fingernails into his bare silken shoulders, and lifted both feet until she found a foothold against a sharply gradated wooden … thing.
Thing? Oh, my. She was standing on a gun carriage, straddling the cascabel of a carronade!
No small wonder the metal was so cold under the flimsy covering of her one petticoat and satin court gown—oh, God. He had the flesh of her thigh between his teeth, his tongue darted out to lick, and her hands left his shoulders and cradled the back of his skull.
“Tomaj!” she cried, smashing his face into her leg. “What are you doing? Get up here! Please, please! I need you, right now!”
He muttered, planting the breadth of his shoulders beneath her thighs, moving in closer, his sinuous tongue licking a squiggly trail up and up toward the core of her, and what could he be thinking? Was this a Hungarian thing? Grasping a handful of his luxuriant hair, she tried to shake his head, but he was a dog set upon a freshly dead rabbit, and now he fairly snorted in his zeal to … do what?
“Ah!” Dagny sobbed from frustration, unsure whether to yank him away from her lap, or to smash his face into her quim, which by now dripped with longing and anger. Panting and crying, she looked to the deckhead for assistance, nearly wishing Slushy would knock down the door clutching a waterfowl, or that the plates and bowls would all fall out of their fiddles.
What was Tomaj thinking? Did he have to be such a—such a Hungarian count? Why couldn’t he just throw her across the dining table and be done with it? She was nearly on the verge of a female orgasm by the time he moved aside the edges of her drawers and bit and sucked the innermost fold of her thigh.
“Tomaj! You are driving me out of my head! Will you just stand up, please, and—AH!”
She realized much later, perhaps three days later, that she had shouted loud enough to wake Sal nearby in the surgeon’s cabin, and perhaps Broadhecker on deck, who by this time had surely taken a caulk with his face in someone’s unwanted collation.
Tomaj, as smooth as a jellyfish through water, slid his adroit tongue the length of her erect clitoris, searing her up her spine and generating a climax that brought her crashing down around his face. Her thighs locked around his neck, she convulsed over and over, her abdomen constricting so tightly she t
hought it might rupture.
This time she knew what was happening, and knew not to be afraid. He manipulated her with suspicious expertise, holding her balanced on the cascabel of the carronade as he slurped and licked with just the right pressure and flair so as to keep her continuously spasming. The knowledge of his exquisite hawk’s nose buried in her quim was enough alone to get her off, but his tongue kept stroking her until her belly muscles ached from the contractions, and she sobbed for him to quit, it was too much.
Yet when he went to unhook her thighs from their vise grip around his neck, she was frozen there, and he had to pry her off with force. Without his support, she nearly took a tumble to the deck, but he caught her under the arms and helped her back to the chair where she buckled, staring dumbly at the rotating dodo bird egg.
He must have gone out onto a quarter gallery, for when he returned he was refreshed. He leisurely poured her another glass of port that she gulped happily, and he at last sank into a chair himself.
Dagny smiled at him for a long time before saying, “And now you must have your satisfaction, after you have so kindly tended to me.”
He shook his head. “No need. I’m happy until all’s blue.”
Dagny frowned. “There will be something else blue if you do not gain your release.” She had heard this dozens of times from grumbling men.
How his laugh soothed her! “If that were true, I’d hardly have a single limb or appendage left. Where do you come up with these stories?” The smile vanished when he said, “Oh. Don’t answer that question. Not something I wish to dwell on. Now you must get back to your cabin—don’t you have an early excursion planned?”
“Tomaj.” Dagny spread her hands flat on the table. “We can discuss Boneaux. I can tell you that he does not love me, and never will. I’m just a diversion to him. There is no room left in his life to love anyone else because he already has so much love. He loves his family, his fortress, Ramavo, his religion, country, home, friends … He is certainly much too smart, if nothing else, to love a mistress.”
A dark shadow had fallen over his beatific countenance at the mention of Boneaux, and Tomaj could not look her in the eye. He swallowed his port as though it were a piece of bar shot. “While I will certainly agree with that, the thought of his hammy hands coming even close to any part of your person fills me with bile.”
His darkness disconcerted her, and she didn’t want to go back to her cabin, so she rose unsteadily. Perching herself lightly onto his lap, she took his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Can you tell me … Why did you leave the navy? It seems to me the sea is your life. I don’t understand why you would want to leave.”
A distant tremor went through him, and he gripped her about the wrist as if to steady them both. His eyes narrowed. “As a seagoing force we had almost no power against the Royal Navy. We were blockaded and attacked every step of the way. It didn’t seem to matter much. So I joined Lafitte.” Releasing her, he exhaled and looked over her shoulder.
“Ah,” she said softly. She wriggled, her thighs clamping over the stiff ridge of his phallus. “I can see it, then.” She kissed him lightly on the bridge of his nose. “Then why did you leave Lafitte?”
“I left Lafitte because I wanted to go where I had power. The American navy attacked us. My house—and Lafitte’s and about thirty others—were burned, and everything we had was lost. I had no wish to apple-polish with the Americans, as Jean was doing.” A few dull thuds came from the deck above, along with the clanging protest of a squashed guitar and the muffled oaths of men. “Ah, the heartwarming clack of the banyan party,” Tomaj mused fondly.
Kissing him on the mouth, Dagny stood. “I shall retire to my cabin,” she said lightly. She paused to retrieve her brooches from the carpet and cast Tomaj a low, sultry look. “But I warn you, Captain. Next time I shall not be so easily deterred.”
“No,” agreed Tomaj. “I don’t imagine you will be.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN WHICH WE FIND OUT WHAT WAS STUCK TO THE BOTTOM OF ZEKE’S SHOE
AS SLUSHY HAD FORETOLD, WHEN DAGNY ARRIVED home at her cottage, there was a summons for her to proceed to Mantasoa. Sal had rushed off on an excursion into the northern rain forest near Nosy Tovaraty, convinced he knew where Tomaj’s celestine mines were.
“But you said he doesn’t want you knowing,” Dagny protested. “He’d tell you if he wanted you to know.”
“Oh, something about Chinese pirates coming to kill me if I know where the mines are,” said Sal, shoving bundles of cooked rice rolled in banana leaves into a knapsack. “That doesn’t frighten me. I’m sure Tomaj doesn’t own all the mines. I might just happen upon one that he doesn’t know about.”
“Why are the Chinese pirates so interested in celestine?”
Sal stopped his activity, looked blankly at the floor, and shrugged. “Maybe they don’t have any in China.”
“Hmm. Take the Lang’s pistol with you, then.”
Dagny invited Zeke to Mantasoa. Zeke had just received his own message from King Radama, approving his plans for the lodge. This news seemed, oddly, to irritate Zeke.
“How did that happen so fast?” he grumbled as the filanzana bearers trudged up the road to Mantasoa. “I didn’t even ask for his approval! What do I care if that pixy-led barbarian king approves of my lodge or not?” Zeke swatted at a swarm of radiant sunset moths with his straw sailor hat crowned with a pom-pom. One of his goals today was to rescue his beaver Quaker hat from Boneaux. Until then, he seemed to reckon the ridiculous French hat would fend off the hordes of wanton women who were eager to get their claws into him. Whereas the beloved Quaker hat kept women at bay by its religious aura, the pom-pom hat would scare them away by its sheer silliness.
“You should care, Zeke. If you have the King’s approval, then everything will run smoothly.”
“You suppose Boneaux pushed through the approval?”
“Boneaux? No, I think not…”
“Oh, yes? How are you so sure of that?”
“Because … Tomaj said he would push it through. Personally. With the king.” She waited for great clouds of disgust that never came. “Boneaux has more influence with Ramavo. Tomaj has influence with the king.”
When they reached the laboratory of the Maison des Singes Diaboliques, Zeke headed for the carpentry shop, where he imagined he could order a few new bedsteads and tables for his inn. “I need a better bar for the saloon,” he said. “The one I have must’ve been taken from a Mexican bodega, because it’s only about three feet tall. That’d be fine, if only Chinamen wanted to get as drunk as a tinker. But the regular white fellows might mistake it for a bootblack stand.”
Dagny hurried into the laboratory, eager to see her sifaka. Tomaj hadn’t allowed her to collect a specimen, citing native fady taboo, so she’d paid someone to collect one for her. She had stuffed its nose and throat with cotton and packed it in salt before having it shipped back to the Maison, where Tomaj or a tribe of irate fady believers were least likely to see it.
Ignoring the gathering of white men over by a cast-iron contraption of some kind on the other side of the warehouse, Dagny fairly skipped to her stuffing table, taking off her elaborate hat of shirred bottle-green velvet. She threw it on the table along with her gloves, where it looked quite at home next to a black and red Malagasy Coucal bird, who seemed as though it wanted to make a festive Christmas nest with the striped ribbon.
“Excuse me, gentlemen.” Boneaux’s voice echoed with authority about the cavernous warehouse, and his heels clicked over briskly. “Ah, Miss Ravenhurst! How good of you to come.” She imagined him rubbing his hands, though she didn’t look up from her sifaka package. “Oh! Sainte merde! Please, let us get away from that horrible rancid animal!”
“Oh, it’s not so—” Dagny choked, picking up her gloves to use as a mask against her mouth. “It’s not so terribly bad, Monsieur! I just should have perhaps eviscerated it prior to having it transported.”
�
��No, no!” Paul held his own gloves to his mouth and nose, and he gestured for an assistant. “Veuillez retirer cet animal immédiatement!”
“No, no! Paul—Monsieur, you cannot. It’s a rare genus of lemur that I collected over in—south of Tamatave. Please, Monsieur. Allow me to skin it, to save the skeleton and the skin.”
Paul’s face wrinkled, like he’d just had a plate of Icelandic sheep’s testicle aspic waved under his nose. “All right.” He shooed away the assistant. “But let us retreat to my office.”
“Mademoiselle!” called Chick the blacksmith, one of the men in the group. “Is your brother here?”
She knew he meant Sal, of whom Chick was inordinately fond. “No,” Dagny called back cheerfully. “He’s out prospecting.”
“Prospecting, eh?” Paul took a seat behind the desk. He reached into a drawer for a bottle of brandy, today proffering two snifters upon the desktop. She knew he must not be angry with her, and she relaxed to see his smiling burly face of which she was so fond. If she were lucky, he would not mention her voyage to Fort Dauphin at all. “Your brother is an odd duck. In one manner, he is so elegant, like a Ganymede. In the other manner, he is so rough, prospecting in the forest for days on end! No amount of dirt ever seems to bother him!”
“Yes, he’s really very fond of dirt.”
“Yes, yes, yes …”
“On the ground, not on his person, of course.”
“Well, now. You see, Miss Ravenhurst.” Why did he call her that, when they were in the office with the door closed? “Today I have not much time to spend with you, only a business proposal to make. First, let me toast. To all of your successful natural discoveries!”
Dagny raised her eyebrows with surprise. Paul had never expressed much interest in the natural world, unless it was something he could harvest for an invention, or something he could burn or build with. Dagny clinked glasses with him, and drank.
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 19
