The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

  “Brandy?” Sal queried. “You gave this boy brandy? Dagny, I’m ashamed of you. We come to Madagascar, and all of your Quaker learning vanishes. Now, what’re these fellows about?”

  Sal lifted a stiff warning arm to shield Dagny from the knot of men tearing up the path from the beach, shoving each other and looking back over their shoulders.

  Hector drew his sword and placed himself square in their path, demanding, “What’s going on?”

  Most men made a wide detour around the youth, but one fellow shrieked, “The king is dead!”

  Dagny sighed. “Yes, we knew that. Come. Hector, sheath that sword.”

  Hector didn’t, and they came within sight of the Port Admiral’s customhouse, forty feet long, situated underneath a cluster of coconut trees. They pressed onward against the ever-increasing flow of men who appeared hell-bent upon getting away from the landing place.

  “Who’s that?” Sal asked.

  King Radama’s sister, attired in the apex of French fashion, had fallen back against her husband, whom Dagny knew as the governor of Tamatave, Prince Rafely. They were the parents of Rakotobe, the heir apparent.

  “I know them,” said Dagny, shoving a few men out of her way to reach the stricken woman, shaking and shuddering against her husband, her mouth all askew, wailing like she was minegny in a tromba ceremony. Tomaj and another white man with side-whiskers leaned against the building smoking cheroots, while the corned Port Admiral failed to get their attention by shrieking louder than the princess, waving his assagai javelin and leaping about. Also ignoring the customs man were Zeke and Youx. They rattled pieces of paper and nodded with agitation at each other.

  Antoine shouted, “I can give you all the fine porcelain that you want, but we must get the approval of the captain!”

  Dagny grasped the quartermaster’s arm. “Antoine. What’s going on here? Why is the princess so distressed?”

  Antoine looked down at her as though she were a tomato frog. “The king is dead!” he cried.

  Dagny sighed. “Yes, we knew that.”

  Zeke shoved his oar in. “Not that king.” He pointed at the flailing couple with a piece of paper. “Their son, the fellow who was supposed to be king. He was murdered, outright dropped in his tracks, along with a few other ripsnorters in the palace. We’re starting to suspect that Radama didn’t quite slit his own throat, if you know what I mean!”

  Hector waved his sword. “Rakotobe! He were a right gentlemanly cove—he taught me lots about iguanas! Those scums of the mud of hell! What a king’s hard bargain! Well, they’ve gotten on the leeway of me now, and I’ll lend them a poke! Someone’s getting a jawbation around these parts!”

  Hector devolved into increasingly obtuse language, and left their group to comfort the mourning couple, bending down onto one knee and lowering his face to the dirt.

  Zeke continued, “There’s a big kabary in the capital today, calling everyone in to swear loyalty to whoever is left alive, which we’re all betting is Boneaux’s friend, Ramavo.”

  Youx added, “It’s a great tradition here when a king dies to eliminate all possible rivals. No one has seen Radama’s mother lately, either.”

  Zeke pointed. “This couple here was called up to the palace, only to learn halfway there their son was dead. So they came back here, trying to take passage on a ship for the Mauritius, but the Port Admiral wouldn’t let them aboard.”

  Youx shuddered. “You can guess their fate.”

  Dagny cringed into Sal’s embrace as a detachment of the king’s soldiers came around the corner of the building. The Port Admiral wailed and ranted, which encouraged the soldiers to approach the couple, poking at them with their assegais.

  The one who seemed to be the lieutenant in charge shouted at Rafely, “You have left your post without permission!”

  “We were summoned to the palace! Our son is dead!” protested the governor.

  “And now you try to flee?” The lieutenant smacked the governor across the head with the shaft of the spear, and down he went on top of his sobbing wife. A few other soldiers kicked him—one even kicked the princess.

  Hector headed for them, waving his sword. “You right bastards! This is how you treat your own royalty the moment a king dies?”

  Dagny and Tomaj went for the boy at the same time, Dagny grasping him by the shoulders, and Tomaj insinuating himself between them and the soldiers, hand on the hilt of his own sword.

  “Desist!” he shouted. “In the name of Radama, who is dead, and so a god now. This is Radama’s sister—show some respect!” Trying to lift the distressed woman was a harder chore, for she had all but disintegrated into the throes of hysteria, and clearly had no wish to stand.

  “Captain Balásházy!” barked the fellow with side-whiskers. “What’s going on here? If these people are royalty, why are they being treated so?”

  The lieutenant sneered, pointing with his spear at the white man. “Who is this vazaha?”

  “Dr. Robert Lyall,” Tomaj told the soldier. “The new British agent. We have orders to proceed to the palace—”

  “No one can go to the palace! They are mourning!” The lieutenant turned to a few soldiers and ordered, “Arrest them!”

  “What in the name of…” sputtered Lyall. “What kind of anarchy is this? Random arresting of the deceased monarch’s family before he’s even laid in the ground—”

  “Lieutenant.” Tomaj reasoned with the man. “Perhaps this situation can be smoothed over if I were to pay a fine. If I pay a fine of, say, a hundred dollars and take these people back to my plantation—”

  “Captain Balásházy,” said the lieutenant, nevertheless glancing rapaciously at the mophurs Tomaj jingled, “this man has abandoned his post! I have orders that I must obey!”

  The wrists of the prince and princess were already tied behind their backs with raffia strips, and soldiers shoved and kicked the prince, and in the case of the princess, hefted her aloft and carried her like a bound hog.

  Tomaj nevertheless pressed the coins into the lieutenant’s hand. “Perhaps just leave the princess. She hasn’t abandoned any post. She was merely trying to find her son.”

  The lieutenant’s nostrils flared, his hand closed over the coins, but he whispered fiercely, “Captain. I have nothing but the greatest respect for you. You have been a long time in these regions. But do not interfere in royal matters that do not concern you!”

  Taking the money, he stalked away behind his troops, the Port Admiral yammering away after them.

  “What did he say?” Lyall demanded.

  Tomaj sighed as Dagny clutched Hector and Sal to her. “He would not listen.”

  “But he sure took the money!” Zeke sputtered.

  “I have no fear for the princess, because of the taboo against shedding royal female blood. Radama’s Great Wife will be queen now,” said Tomaj, “and you know what that means.”

  “No!” Lyall cried. “What does that mean, pray tell?”

  “She’s anti-Christian, a Messalina when in her good cups—Caligula when riled. She loathes foreigners, particularly the British, and only the king’s calming hand has stayed her wrath thus far.”

  “Oh, dear.” Lyall fanned himself with his hat. “Oh, my.”

  “Welcome to Madagascar, Dr. Lyall,” Tomaj said affably.

  Tomaj went to Antananarivo anyway with Dr. Lyall. He said they could not keep him from the kabary. His efforts to convince Dagny to move to Barataria were passionate and eloquent, but the more he pleaded, the more she resisted. At first she wasn’t certain why it was a reprehensible idea—after all, he did have the space, and it was a great deal more protected than the Tamatave cottage, particularly now with every man in Harmony Row on the alert against marauding ricemen. But it didn’t feel right to Dagny, and at last she resolved why.

  She’d arrived in Madagascar determined to avoid the charity of any man. But her destitute state had enticed her to accept Boneaux’s largesse, which was all right. One man, an engineering
magnate at that, who gave one gowns, Kashmir shawls, and slippers, was far preferable to the charity of twenty blateroons who pawed one and boasted of untold generosity if they left so much as a tankard of nightcap behind. Now that Zeke was finally earning his keep, and Sal brought in intermittent paychecks from his sale of lime and potash and hiring out his prospecting skills, Dagny was hell-bent on not relying upon Tomaj.

  Far better if she could come to him with an aye-aye, which they could take to Pamplemousses, where they would be the sensation of the natural world, the envy of luminaries such as John James Audubon, Titian Peale, and Alexander von Humboldt. The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia would fund an expedition so she could continue her travels, perhaps to Inner Africa to study the troglodyte gorilla that had been tearing fingers off men. She told Tomaj none of this. She wanted to come to him with a clean conscience, with none of the slatternly connotations of the mistress forced to exchange low acts for lodging.

  She passed several days with no word from Tomaj. She occupied herself with stuffing her fish the first day, so gruesomely awash with gelatinous innards she stood in the tub naked and had Sal pour buckets of water over her. She was amused to discover the fish’s miniscule brain weighed only a quarter ounce, and she noted the air bladder was partly ossified. The second day she took an overnight excursion with Hector into the northern forest, where they amused themselves with the night-glass Tomaj had given her.

  Hector demonstrated his method for catching aye-ayes, but in the morning all they had in their gourd were a few unfortunate chameleons. Dagny brought some brandy, with which she hoped to make Hector drunk enough to blurt out the secret about Tomaj’s first wife, but by that time, Dagny quite forgot to enquire. The next thing she knew, she awoke in her raised bed of sticks and leaves, her face smashed into the night-glass, a most fascinating six-foot-long boa winding itself around her foot. She enticed it, and cooed to it, until Hector leapt up from his slumber and thrashed it with his cutlass, so that she now had two pieces of snake to sew back together.

  Back in the Tamatave cottage, Dagny was surprised—mostly because he was rarely there anymore—to find Zeke in the drawing room sharing a cocktail with Slushy and Zaleski. The acrid odor of charcoal drifted in a low yellow cloud layer from the kitchen, commingled with the telltale aroma of sulphuric acid.

  “Miss Ravenhurst!” cried Slushy, jumping to his feet and holding his hands out as though he delivered grenades.

  “Little darling,” Dagny told Hector, who had been carrying the knapsack crammed with the snake halves the entire way from the forest, “put that on the stuffing table.”

  “Good to see you,” Hector said to Slushy. “Thought you’d swallowed the anchor or gone through the hoops, you idler.” He shook Zaleski’s hand as he passed by, the seasoned seaman recoiling—not from the odor of the boy or bag, but from the sight of the snake’s head that unexpectedly greeted him.

  Zeke waved a generous arm. “Ah, sit down, will you, pal? Have some more rotgut.” Hooking a hand around Slushy’s feeble arm, he jammed him back into the chair. Zeke explained to Dagny, “These are my guests. They’ve been telling me about the goings-on at the palace. Apparently a few coves have been strangled, drowned, or had massive torture of their genitals.”

  “Sakina!” Zaleski agreed jovially.

  Dagny placed a hand on her brother’s shoulder. “Thank you for the pleasant news, Ezekiel. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d truly enjoy some water to wash w—”

  “Dagny!”

  Sal’s voice was muffled beneath a mask of Soudanese cotton covering his mouth. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, blowpipe in hand, the image of an alchemist in the throes of creation with his Turkish trousers flowing. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”

  Zeke poked a thumb at his brother. “He thinks he’s got something.”

  “No, no!” insisted Sal. “I’ve got it, the reason why the Kwangtungmen want the celestine, the reason why the Italians want it—I’ve got it!”

  Jolted from her stupor, Dagny raced forward. “What? What is it?”

  Sal clenched his fist. “I knew it! Didn’t I say that celestine decrepitates before the blowpipe?”

  “I suppose …”

  “On charcoal it fuses in two seconds to a milky white alkaline globule—”

  “Yes, yes? And what?”

  “It phosphoresces when heated and makes the sulphuret of strontia—”

  Dagny snaked a finger under Sal’s mask, to lower it so she could better hear him. “And what?”

  Sal’s round eyes went holy then. “It creates the color red!”

  Every last man jack in the room held their breath, their limbs stiff in anticipation of more information.

  Well. She supposed it was up to her to break this tension.

  “And …?”

  Sal waved his clenched fist. “Don’t you see? Up until now, the only color in fireworks is … what?”

  Dagny shrugged. “They flash orange, I suppose because of the gunpowder, and white most of the time … Oh! Oh, fuck me dry!”

  Now every man jack leapt to his feet, clamoring to be the first to claim the discovery of the reason the ricemen wanted celestine. There ensued a general uproar of goodwill, and much back-slapping jocosity, and the pouring of sloshing spirits into glasses.

  Dagny shook Sal so vehemently that his blowpipe nearly flew from his hand. Zaleski was at his side, clapping him on the back, and Zeke even shouted, “Leave it up to my brother, the ancient Cherokee medicine man! I always knew he’d figure out something of this nature, what with all that flapdoodle about chemistry …”

  Dagny jammed Sal into a dining table chair. “Sal, you’re a genius! Red in fireworks? Who would have imagined?”

  “Who’d think,” Zaleski shouted, “King George could have been using red in his set pieces of the flag!”

  “Who’d think,” Hector bawled, “that ol’ Errol Zaleski would care what King George did!”

  Sal continued, “This opens up entire worlds of possibilities, such as the potential for the color green, which can come from barium, and blue, which comes from copper. It’s not outside the realm of reason!”

  While the others congratulated each other by toasting more wassails and threatening to burst out into song at any moment, Dagny asked Sal, “Do you think the Italians know what it can be used for, then? It’s obvious the ricemen do. But correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve never known Italians to be grand makers of firecrackers.”

  “Neither have I. But they have great chemists, and if we can drive the price up … Well, I was trying to think of a way of building a factory here, just processing it right at the mine. I’ll need to find a way to stabilize it … We could probably make some really good flares with it, too, better than those ones Tomaj is always complaining about.”

  “Make a factory here? Haven’t you heard the things Zaleski and Zeke have been saying about the torturing, arrests, and the general anti-vazaha feelings coming over the island? I don’t think now is the best time—”

  Sal’s ebullience would not be quashed. He grasped her by both arms. “Wouldn’t you rather be here, close to Tomaj? This is where all the animals and plants are, anyway! You yourself always say this island is a wonderland, and now Zeke has his brothel—his tavern, and everyone’s happy! Besides, Boneaux is the one who knows how to design a factory. Not I, I’m hardly an engineer. When you see him, can you question him?”

  Dagny put her hand to her breast modestly. “To be honest, Sal, I hardly think Paul will be sending for me anymore. He’s angry about Tomaj, and the last time I saw him, there was a slight rumpus about a dead aye-aye—”

  “You’re not going to respond to his message telling you to meet him?”

  “What message?”

  “The one Slushy—Slushy! Will you not give her the dispatch, man?”

  Slushy sidled over on the double-time, withdrawing an envelope stamped with Paul’s familiar seal. “Of course, miss … You know that with all the additional intr
igue around the palace these days, it was approximately five times harder to get that message down the mountain? Why, the day before the king died—or was murdered, depending upon who you’re talking to at the moment—Monsieur Boneaux’s eldest son had just arrived from Paris, having just taken a degree from the École des Mines …”

  Drifting into the kitchen, Dagny broke the seal and read in Paul’s flamboyant handwriting:

  Mon visage de poupée,

  It was difficult watching you take your leave when I last saw you. I had only wished to please you with the gift of the rodent. Now I feel that I have failed you miserably. I cannot bear the thought of mon visage de poupée in the arms of that crapule. Please, please, come meet me at the house of Alexander Cameron on the evening of the 18th inst. Tell me what amends I can make to bring you back into my hands again.

  Your faithful servant,

  P.B.

  “Slushy,” Dagny cried, bursting into the dining room, waving the letter. “But he didn’t tell me where to meet him!”

  Slushy frowned. “Alexander Cameron’s! Wasn’t that clear?”

  Dagny put her hands on her hips. “One of these days, my good sir, I will find out how you know all these things. Since you seem to be so omniscient, perhaps you can tell me … What’s the latest word on Captain Balásházy?”

  Slushy looked a little crestfallen. “Ah, on that, not much, miss. Just that he’s been seen in the capital attending several kabàrys, where they would not let that Dr. Lyall in, and so Lyall returned to Tamatave, where British agents were accustomed to being lodged in your most commodious cottage belonging to Monsieur Boneaux, because as you know, on this island we have no national rivalries, so if you’ve any spare rooms …”

  Sighing, Dagny moved off to her chamber.

  Sal asked, “So, you are going to meet Boneaux?”

  Dagny turned to face the room of men. “I suppose I shall. Although it would be exceedingly pleasant, Mr. Slushy, if you were to somehow materialize a note from Captain Balásházy!”