The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

  “That I’ll try, miss. But Monsieur Boneaux should be in a joyous mood—it was just announced he is the new Mpitaiza Andriana, the Queen’s Guardian, and in turn he presented the queen, who has named herself Ranavalona, with the most extraordinary mechanical bird. I heard tell that it eats gunpowder and excretes bullets!”

  “Which flag do you fight under, Johnny?” Zaleski enquired. “Every time you talk about those buffoons, you sound downright laudatory.”

  Slushy shrugged. “I want them to be happy. Then they leave us alone, and we’re happy … No?”

  Dagny was cornered by the dreaded Mrs. Alexander Cameron, a shrew much given to complaining, who saw no good in anything. As they awaited the conclusion of Paul’s engagement with Alexander, who was showing him the workings of his nearby shoe factory, Libby insisted that Dagny evaluate her poor hydrangea bushes. She demanded to know why, this year, the pink blooms weren’t as vibrant as in years past. Then they moved on to where Libby wanted to know why the red bells of her russelia juncea were being shed so soon, because certainly the plants at Count Balásházy’s estate were thriving. She continuously mentioned Count Balásházy, as though she were trawling for information that only Dagny could provide.

  “Now these orchids, I’ve seen them to flourish at Barataria.” Mrs. Cameron sniffed. “How do you accomplish that?”

  Dagny frowned. “You seem to think I’m the count’s gardener. Rather, he employs gardeners from whom I learn much.”

  “But you must tell them much, also.”

  “Yes, but I don’t live there, my dear Libby. I spend most of my time wandering about his estate, not in his parkland. Why don’t we go inside? It’s candle-lighting, and we can barely see the plants.”

  Libby’s face was one of alacrity. “Oh, I shall get the boys to light the flambeaux. There are certain new rules handed down by the queen to observe a mourning period, have you not heard?”

  “Some of them. I know that today I’ve already broken two—riding, whether on horseback or filanzana, and abstention from showy dress.” Libby was obviously in complete agreement, and she managed from her shrimp stature to look down her nose at Dagny. Dagny pretended to confide in the catamaran. “It simply wouldn’t do to meet Monsieur Boneaux in a plain dress, you must understand. But this rule about staying out-of-doors until past candle-lighting, that I haven’t heard.”

  “Let Monsieur Boneaux tell you. Here he comes.”

  Paul was apparently exempt from the edict against wearing fancy clothing. He sauntered down the crushed coral path proudly displaying his gold epaulets. Across his military jacket with white facings and gold buttons (though he had never, to Dagny’s knowledge, been in the navy) he had added a jaunty red sash and, quite inexplicably, a chapeau bras hat worn in the athwartship manner that always looked so juvenile.

  “Ah, Miss Ravenhurst,” he said happily.

  Libby Cameron curtsied obsequiously, allowed Paul to kiss her hand, and went fluttering down the path like a schoolgirl. Dagny took Paul’s arm and they strolled into the darkening depths of the garden.

  His hand was warm over hers. “I am so glad you came. So very glad.” He reeked of clove, which nauseated Dagny.

  “I reckoned you asked me to meet you here because your son has arrived from Paris.”

  “Ah, yes! Jean is a most vigorous boy. He was here two years ago, before you came, and he showed great interest in Mantasoa. So now I have allowed him—well, to encourage him in his engineering studies, you understand—to be a sort of foreman in my warehouses, and …”

  Dagny nodded. “And it wouldn’t do for him to see me.” Men scurried behind them firing torches, so that Paul’s silhouette was backlit with a religious intensity. “Perhaps I should send someone to Mantasoa to remove my effects. Can you tell me about Queen Ranavalona’s regulation about staying out-of-doors past candle-lighting?”

  “Ah.” Paul laughed, and stopped walking. “It’s not so much a rule about staying outside. Not everybody has to.” Pressing her toward a high wall, he removed his hat, placing it atop the bricks above her head. Dagny saw that the red ribbon across his chest was pinned with a medal of the Order of Radama. Radama had bestowed upon Tomaj a Grand Officer medal, but Paul wore a Commander medal now, the highest honor.

  Dagny gasped to see his head completely shorn. She’d never noticed how his ears stuck out, nor how shaped like an egg his head was. It was exceedingly unattractive. “What happened?”

  Paul laughed as he ran his head over his shaven pate. “Oh, this? Court mourning. Never mind about that.” His large body pressed her into the brick wall, and he cradled her jaw in his hand.

  “You had lovely silken yellow hair.” Uncomfortable, Dagny looked beyond his shoulder as if hoping to distract him. Shaven heads for court mourning? What if Tomaj had also to shave his head? She loved nothing more than to crush his face between her naked breasts and thread her fingers through his pelt of impossibly glossy black hair. “Does everyone have to do that?”

  “Only members of the court.” He frowned, and tipped her chin so that she was forced to look in his face. “The other rule is that we avoid licentiousness during daylight hours.”

  Oh, dear. He means to be licentious. “Then perhaps we should go indoors—”

  “Doll, doll!” Paul crushed her against the wall, plying her lap with an unsubtle lunge of his hips. “I invited you here so that I could make secure our love for each other.” His lips brushed her jawbone. “Don’t you see? I love you, Dagny! You are the crowning rose of my life. When I am with you, I feel a man. You are so vibrant, full of life and joy. You make me laugh and take my thoughts off the mundane chores of daily life. Ah, I work too much! When you are not here to satiate me, I turn into a monster!”

  Dagny squirmed to think that three months ago she would have welcomed such an outpouring of love on Paul’s part. She would have still scoffed at it and giggled, as she did now, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as repellent. The clove odor used to amuse her. She slid her hands to his shoulders and pushed him away. “Paul, my dear! I don’t think … I don’t think it’s proper for us to remain lovers.”

  He allowed himself to be pushed. “And why not?”

  Rapidly, Dagny said, “The queen! Has she not said anything to you about me? She can hardly look favorably upon our meetings. Does she not want to keep you for herself?”

  A stupid look came over Paul’s face, as though he didn’t want to hear her words. His jaw slightly slack, he shook his head briefly. “No. No.” What was he saying “no” to? “We must be lovers, Dagny. You are the only joyous thing in my life!”

  Dagny took a few steps back toward the path. “Well, then. Perhaps you will just have to learn to live without me.”

  He grabbed her arm so roughly both her feet were off the ground for a moment. Spinning her to face him, he shouted, “No! I will not live without you! I will not let you go! No wife, or son, or queen will force me to give you up!”

  She tried to extricate herself from his claws. “Paul. Be logical. Have you ever gone directly to the queen upon taking your leave of me? Can she not smell me upon you, as I can smell her upon you? She’s been causing citizens to be flung off cliffs, Paul! What will she do to you? She knows all; she sees all. She isn’t going to just laugh and say, ‘Oh, how fun of you, Paul!’ Now that you’re her Mpitaiza Andriana, she isn’t going to stand for me.”

  Paul tossed her arm away with rage. “It’s that popinjay!”

  “What?”

  “That freebooter who turned down the queen’s favor—she loathes him now, Dagny, don’t you see? He was too ignorant to accept her proposal—now he will pay! As he will pay for defiling my doll, my precious jewel, ah, Dagny!” Falling to his knee, he grasped the front of her gown and shoved his hot, bald face into her lap. “Tell me you love me, my doll! Tell me, or I shall fling myself off a cliff!”

  Dagny tried to writhe from his grip. “Paul, please! We cannot be licentious in the garden right now! What will Cameron tell the
queen?”

  Surging to his feet, Paul cried, “Cameron will tell nothing, because Cameron has known for months we are lovers! And yet you refuse to say you love me! Look …” Without turning, he gestured behind him, and a servant emerged from behind a bush carrying a wooden box. “I bring you this evidence of my love. Do you not remember the mechanical automaton I built for you?”

  Ah, the mechanical dodo! Dagny melted a bit recalling how blissful and content they were the day he had shown her his invention. She recalled what a good man Paul was—he had never struck her, had showered her with gifts, had been kind and jolly to her brothers … He had only caused the dead aye-aye to be brought to her because he had a good heart, and wanted to help her. “Yes, yes, I do remember that, Paul. When I asked you about it, you said an artisan was fabricating a gear …”

  Paul smiled, grabbing the box from the servant and placing it in the middle of a bench. “Come, come!” he said, gesturing boyishly, his old self once more. “Come and see!”

  Dagny wanted to see the automaton again—how it had filled her heart with gladness to see the delicate thing, capable of operating on its own, with no help from any outside authority. She sat, yet an odd unease came over her as Paul unclasped the box and opened the lid. Didn’t Slushy say he’d given the mechanical dodo to the queen? Perhaps he’d built the queen a different one? Perhaps Slushy was wrong …

  Paul had the impish look on his face as in days of old as he lifted the metal creature from the box, looking up at her from under his gold-dusted lashes. “This animal is even better than the duck, because it walks.”

  An elephant.

  Dagny had never known that she contained such a well-spring of despair and sadness within herself. How was it possible for one person, sitting not three feet away, to be so full of impish happiness, and her to be shuddering with her hand to her mouth, a bucket of tears flooding her eyes?

  “See? It walks, and the head moves. Very mechanical, yes? This is my gift to you.”

  The elephant wasn’t nearly as good. Certainly, when Paul wound it up, its legs moved, she could see that from behind a waterfall of tears. He placed it on the bench and it walked toward her, lowering and raising its head and trunk, but it didn’t have the delicacy, the grace, the intricate framework of the dodo. It just lumbered. The dodo was a skeleton of twisted copper wire, and one could see inside the ribs to its beating mechanized heart. Paul had only built the elephant to placate her, because the dodo had been meant for the queen from the start, and he’d only shown it to her that day because he was carried away on a wave of lust.

  Dagny leapt to her feet before the elephant could reach her. Her words surprised her, but come they must, or she might have exploded from the pressure.

  “Take your damned elephant, Monsieur Boneaux!” she shouted, as though drunk. “I am evidently not good enough in your eyes to warrant a damned mechanical dodo, so you can take your elephant and fling yourself off a cliff with it! Do I search for something as mundane as elephants? No, I do not! I search for dodos, for rare, extinct creatures! Perhaps you think you’re dealing with an ignorant lick-spigot, and that I may have been in the past, but I am no longer!”

  In her rage, she made a motion toward the elephant automaton, but something in her held her back from smashing it to smithereens, and she retreated. Paul grabbed the elephant and replaced it in the box, then stood slowly.

  Dagny continued to yell, “You have the audacity to claim that you love me—you love only yourself first of all, your queen second, your wife third … I do believe I come in there somewhere around nineteenth, when you’re done loving your daily foreman levees!”

  Paul’s voice was like boiling water. “Dagny. It’s just the influence of that spadassin that is making you upset. You are just acting on a coup de tête, brought on by the low influence of his cock.”

  Dagny huffed to hear his vile words. “Paul,” she seethed, “the influence of his cock has brought me jubilation and well-being, something the exalted status of your own cock has never done. He may be a pirate, but he is a man of integrity and honesty!”

  “Don’t you see?” Paul bellowed, overpowering her voice with the resonance of his own. “He has mesmerized you! That is his way!”

  “Yes? And how many other women do you make love to every day, Paul? Two that I know of. Will you give up your wife for me?” She scoffed, answering her own question. “No. Will you give up your queen for me? No. So.” Her voice was low and murderous. “How important can I possibly be?”

  “You have been mesmerized!” shouted Paul. “You have been in the company of pirates for far too long! Hah! And I thought you were a genuine lady!”

  Neither spoke for several long moments, each huffing through their nostrils at the other. At last Dagny said, “I am a genuine lady, Paul. For the first time in my life, I’m being treated like one. And not by someone who has eighteen other better things to do.”

  Turning on her boot heel, Dagny flounced back up the path.

  Paul called after her, “And tell your damned brother to get his damned barrels of lime out of my warehouse!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  TENNESSEE GHOST STORY

  SO IT BEGAN, THE INSIDIOUS AND BLATANT PERSECUtion of all vazaha missionaries, Christians, and teachers. The mannish and surly Queen Ranavalona wiped out most of the enlightened policies of Radama, declaring that she wasn’t bound by treaties with Great Britain, and refusing to admit Lyall into the palace. She must have been aware that this meant British subsidies would be withheld, but Tomaj suspected her of planning to reinstate the slave trade.

  Tomaj had professed fealty to the new queen at the kabary—of course, he did, did he want to wind up like the few who protested that she wasn’t the true heir, and were thrown from the cliffs outside the Rova?—but he’d felt like a right ass with that simpering arrogant Boneaux standing beside her in the ridiculous chapeau bras hat. By placing Boneaux to her left and the secretary of state to her right, she informed the populace they were the two most important men in the nation, and it rankled Tomaj. Tomaj stood with the governors of provinces and the delegates from Oman, the Comores, and Zanzibar. It was purely a necessary political move on his part, if he ever hoped to mitigate the embargoes placed upon him, or stay the rampant criminal destruction of his property.

  So he mouthed along with 100,000 others, “It is so! It is so!” when the queen raised her scepter, proclaiming that the Great God, in a highly circuitous and muddled manner in which He didn’t usually operate as far as Tomaj knew, had bequeathed the empire to her.

  Tomaj had irked the queen several years back with his refusal to become one of her sparrow hawks. He told her then it was from respect for Radama, an unlikely excuse in a nation where random fornication was the rule. The truth was, she repelled him, in person and in mind, and he’d often joked with Radama that there was a good reason she’d failed to bear him a child: Radama loathed to go near her bed.

  Perhaps she was satisfied now with the erotic talents of the Grand Frenchman, for when the Zanzibari ambassador, swathed in fine silks and laden with diamonds, had asked for her hand in the name of his Sultan, she had declined. Or perhaps she didn’t want to share power with anyone.

  Back at Barataria, the forenoon levees were boisterous and energetic, bringing to Tomaj’s mind similar assemblies at the first Barataria Bay in Louisiana. On Grand Terre there were always pleasurable levees at Jean Lafitte’s house, which faced the Gulf of Mexico. There they came together to discuss which shipping lanes were most strategic, arguing the merits and locations of available prizes, and debating in depth the weather and women. On any given afternoon there could be found Yves, Antoine Youx, and his brother, Dominique, who had served in Napoleon’s navy along with Renato Beluche. Louis Chighizola, missing half a nose due to an unfortunate duel. Vincent Gambi, the greatest assassin among all Baratarians. Some time around 1820 someone brought Tomaj the New Orleans Courier newspaper imparting that Gambi had been killed by his associates with th
e very “bloody axe which he so often used in murdering the victims of his cupidity and wretchedness.” Finding Gambi sleeping atop $12,000, they simply cut off his head.

  In Tomaj’s crew, Youx alone had survived of the original Baratarians, along with Slushy, who could be found more often in Zeke’s chop-house concocting dishes of “European cuisine.” Tomaj was fortunate Slushy no longer harassed his chef, Ramonja, who really did know how to make grilled sea bass with Italian champagne sauce, potage of puréed peas with small croûtons, and whose meringue des pommes en herrison, a blend of apples and hedgehogs, was a confectionary marvel.

  Now, in Tomaj’s study, Monsieur Launois made an appearance only to say that he had sold his forty thousand coffee trees to the queen and was moving his family and operations to Bourbon. Launois’s land abutted the massive holdings of Boneaux, so the implication was obvious. In the olden days, Tomaj would have upbraided Launois for not offering him the acreage first, but today, he wouldn’t have even entertained the notion of buying it.

  “There is a bad feeling in Madagascar!” Launois said with fervor. “The queen has instituted a caste system, have you not heard? She has placed vazaha servants just one step above the andevo black slaves, and that is only because there are so few vazaha servants!”

  “My servant,” said Rabelais, “was going to the market in Mahanoro when he passed by a brigand who had been sawn completely in half! My people should not have to witness things of that nature!”

  There followed a general hubbub, a litany of new tortures seen by planters or their servants: men flayed alive, or having their balls smashed in the horrifying sakina trial. Even more horrifying than the ball crushing was the torture in which victims were lashed to poles in deep pits, which were then filled to the waist with boiling water. Their lower bodies were cooked, while their brains remained alert to the torment.

  “I must admit.” Chick confessed. “I have been considering retiring to India. I am getting much too old for this questionable sort of existence, and society in India is so much more genteel.”