The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

  “No joke!” Ramonja shrieked. “No joke!”

  “Errol wouldn’t pull a poor skit like that,” Hector said, hushed.

  “—and I aim to get to the bottom of it! Come with me, Sal.” Dagny reached out for her brother and took his hand, yanking him to his feet. “This is a questionable stunt even for Zaleski, who is, after all, probably just trying to take the glory away from the duke, who has come honorably to ask for my hand—”

  Dragging Sal, Dagny took one step and stopped.

  Tomaj stood at the top of the garden path, imbued with an erect honor and pride, smiling slightly, shyly. From ten yards off, the brilliance of his tourmaline-limned eyes struck her with such power her legs became sickeningly weak. The last thing she saw, before all the blood drained from her head and her legs collapsed under her, was the sublime beauty of his aquiline nose, tilted just so, that she would get the full benefit of its hawk-like splendor.

  Dagny woke to one big stew.

  At least twenty men were in her drawing room, shouting, gesticulating, roaring in a mélange of four different languages, the most exotic of which was Errol Zaleski’s Limehouse Reach barking.

  Dagny raised herself on an elbow and surveyed the room. No one looked at her.

  There, at the center of this host of men, stood Tomaj. He wasn’t participating in the mêlée, merely standing detached and observing, and when Dagny placed her feet on the floor and sat upright, his eyes locked on her.

  It was Tomaj, and yet … different. This man was a bit shorter, not quite coming to the towering heights of Zeke Zhukov. His peridot-green eyes didn’t swim with the depths of sadness that Tomaj had possessed—this one was lighter, happier, perhaps more shallow. He was just as cocky as Tomaj as he smiled tentatively at her and came around the group of men to place his palm on his belly and bow politely.

  “Countess Balásházy,” he said, his voice rich with the Magyar tones that simultaneously chilled and warmed Dagny to the core so she could scarcely breathe. He had none of the New York, New Orleans, or Malagasy luxuriance of Tomaj. He was pure Hungarian. “I apologize for taking you by surprise. I feared if I sent you a note, you would not receive me. I do not know what tales my brother told you of me. But I felt I must see you, so this fine gentleman assisted me.”

  The other men quieted when they saw Dagny had woken from her swoon. She allowed Zeke to take her hand and draw her to her feet, and she barely noticed the fierce scowl Zeke affixed upon the count.

  He continued, “I am Count Izsak Balásházy of Nagycenk.”

  Dagny fought the compulsion to throw her arms around his neck and plaster great kisses upon him. Her head was addled with the grogginess of an entire bottle of champagne, and she was glad when Ramonja pressed a dainty glass of laudanum negus on her. Taking it without looking at it, after swallowing she blinked her eyes several times, hoping or fearing the vision of Tomaj would vanish. Yes—he was nearly as handsome as Tomaj … nearly. He was absent of that heavy-lidded sensuality that had struck her so the first time she’d laid eyes on Tomaj, when gazing up at him while he cradled her, the “mermaid,” on his lap. He had the same proud aquiline nose, though missing the bump at the bridge, obtained in a fistfight, Tomaj had told her, with Antoine’s brother, Dominique Youx.

  She tried to breathe normally. “Yes,” she finally uttered. “You frightened me. I see now. You’re welcome in my home.”

  She moved to the pianoforte as men returned to their former outbursts.

  “Countess!” João cried. “You cannot let this navegador into your home! He must come speak to me first. As your affianced, it is I who has dominion over whom is granted audience with you.”

  Izsak, having followed Dagny to the pianoforte, turned to face João. Dagny studied his expression minutely—he was his brother when he rolled his eyes skyward and scoffed, “Affianced? This is the first I’ve heard of this! If anyone has dominion, it is I who may allow her to be affianced to anyone! My brother has barely been in”—he turned to Zaleski, who appeared to be one of the few who had taken a shine to him—”what do you call it? David Jones’s wardrobe?”

  Demurely, Zaleski folded his hands before his crotch and intoned, “Fiddler’s Green.”

  Izsak renewed his attack with vigor. “Fiddler’s Green for two or three years before you start moving right on in”—here he squiggled his hand with the worminess of a snake—”and start usurping his widow’s future!”

  Hector elbowed João aside and confronted Tomaj’s brother, hands on hips. “And who might be oozing all the way across a few oceans to try and lay claim to his brother’s legacy—a brother he didn’t bother talking to for twenty years, might I add! You, you fake and bogus count! You’re no burner, no man of extraordinary abilities as your brother was. You’ll never find a way to set the Thames on fire. You’re nothing but a poor relation butt!”

  Zeke, standing behind Hector, clapped a hearty hand on his shoulder, and chuckled maliciously. “You go tell ‘em, Bellingham. Only time I heard the count mention this muttonhead was that time at Slushy’s funeral he told us that story, how they came to New York and gave Slushy a whaling that left him crippled.”

  “Look,” said Izsak, holding out both hands with palms facing the floor. “I understand the hatred. I haven’t seen my brother since 1808, and I went to Madagascar to find him.”

  “Aye, to find his damned fortune, more like!” Hector shouted.

  Izsak remained calm. “I knew nothing until I went ashore at Tamatave after having sailed to America first. I have been traveling for a year to find him. I expected to find my older brother, and all I found was a crazy, dilapidated old plantation being run—if one can call it that—by whalemen from Boston.”

  Tomaj’s brother spoke to the hostile quartet of Hector, Zeke, Youx, and João, and Broadhecker, Firebrand, and Hegemsness behind them. His long arms fell to his sides, and he cocked an angry hip, his body as lean and muscular as Tomaj’s. Dagny found herself gravitating to him, basking in his presence—she only wished she could bury her face in his neck, to see if he smelled of vanilla, or even old libraries. “That’s how I found out he was dead. And János Kovács was dead at the hands of some absurd Frenchman whom this gentleman”—and he gestured politely at Zaleski—”later killed.”

  “Actually,” said Zaleski, in an uncustomary sheepish manner, “it were Cap’n Balásházy who killed him first. I only killed him again … later.”

  Izsak exhaled. “So.” Only it came out exotically like zo, thrilling Dagny so deeply she again accepted a glass of laudanum negus from Ramonja. “I ask for your permission to speak to his widow.” Turning to look down at Dagny, again there was the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, and she knew she could never resist him.

  “You don’t need their permission,” Dagny replied. “Come, let us walk in the garden.”

  Setting her empty glass onto a table, Dagny strode out the front door, pausing on the portico to remove her soiled apron.

  They stood for a long time without speaking, gazing out at the garden that Dagny had designed in the Barataria manner, though no one would allow her to call the new plantation Barataria, fearing that some might connect it to Lafitte’s, or Tomaj’s Barataria, and come seeking recompense. So she’d called it Pellegrin Green.

  When Stormalong hove into sight, sashaying her alluring behind down the gravel drive, Dagny at last spoke. “This is Tomaj’s dog.”

  Izsak crouched down to take the dog’s massive head in his hands, scrunching her ears with a genuine affection. Standing erect, he looked down at Dagny with the dazzling Balásházy eyes that made one shudder, and she took his arm as they descended the steps.

  “That is the sort of dog I imagine Tomaj would have,” he said.

  “You know it’s very troubling for me to discuss him,” Dagny stated. To mitigate that, she hurried on, “so I must ask you what it is you want here in the Brazil.”

  Izsak inhaled deeply. “I want to make things right, as I tried to do in New Y
ork, but things didn’t… turn out the way I intended. János Kovács refused to tell us where Tomaj was, so my … associates punched him.”

  Dagny stiffened. “Did more than ‘punch,’ him … Mr. Balásházy.” She refused to call this man “Count.”

  Izsak patted her hand. Dagny dared to glance at his hands, almost as beautifully well-formed and expressive as Tomaj’s. “Ah, I know, I know, but the poor valet would not relent …” He sighed deeply, looking about him at the trees. “Countess. You may not believe me, but I loved my brother very much. We were both Hussars together, both danced in the ballrooms of Vienna, both courted … well.” He chuckled exotically, his voice rich in his throat. “Courted the same women, yes. Tomaj and I were very close. When our father died last year, I decided to go to New Orleans to find him.”

  Dagny was relieved when the path diverged into a stand of walnut trees in full bright yellow flower. Now João and the others standing on the portico could not spy on them. She withdrew her hand from Izsak’s arm and stopped walking, looking up at him. He did have the same sorrowful eyes, after all … “To gloat that you were the sole survivor, and master of the seventy-thousand-acre estate?”

  He shook his head. “No …”

  “Then why else? After all, were you not half-Jewish yourself? Why didn’t your father despise you as much as he despised Tomaj?”

  Izsak looked up at the trees. His lips moved, but it seemed the enormity of the situation was too much to speak in simple terms. At length he looked at her, and took her hands by force, though she tried to cringe away, and remained stiff against him.

  “Our father was a heartless man, but he relented when he realized the gravity of what he’d done. That’s why he sent me to New York to try and find them, to bring them back.”

  “Tomaj did say that were he given your message, were he given the chance to choose, he might have gone back with you to Hungary.”

  Ah, so the brother could raise just one eyebrow, too. “Our father did despise me as much as Tomaj, maybe even more so, because Tomaj was the firstborn, and showed the most intelligence and skill.” He shrugged. “As for me, I can only travel and write books about horse-racing, economics, and social views—subjects of the privileged aristocracy, encouraging them to join the cities of Pest and Buda together, for example. I have not become king of a savage island, as my brother did, or sail the wide oceans commanding hundreds of men, men who followed him merely because they loved him. No, my legacy is to build bridges, to bring steam shipping to the Danube, and to found the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia.”

  With that, he released Dagny’s hands and strolled onward down the path, holding one palm flat to his belly as his brother always had.

  Dagny scurried to catch up. “Academy? Academy of what sort?”

  Now Izsak seemingly had not a care in the world. “Oh! An academy of sciences.” When he stopped walking and looked down at her, he had the crooked, sly smile that was so familiar to Dagny, and she felt herself smile, too. “That’s right. I have heard you are a great naturalist, that you have made many great discoveries in botany and biology.” He nodded as if seeing her completely for the first time. “Hungary can use intelligent minds such as yours.”

  Dagny felt herself blush. “Oh, but I—”

  “You are to marry that Portuguese duke.”

  “No!” she cried, surprising herself with the force of her denial. “I mean, ah, I have yet to dissuade him from thinking that. He only just asked me an hour ago. Tomaj was the only man I ever loved, and I can never love another, Mr….”

  “Call me Izsak.”

  “I am sorry. There is only one Count Balásházy, to my thinking.”

  “Yes. And there is only one Countess Balásházy.” He took her arm again as they continued walking.

  “Oh, you are not married?”

  “No. I have yet to meet anyone in my travels. Marriage is a valiant ideal to strive for, but it has never offered comfort to me. I was not as fortunate as my brother.”

  Dagny felt warm inside, and exceedingly unreal, as though she’d wake up and realize Tomaj’s brother had only been a dream. So she squeezed his forearm to her. “You know, Tomaj never had any children. But the boy closest to him is that blond youth, Hector Bellingham, from England.”

  “Oh, that boy who despises me?” Izsak smiled.

  Yes, he was lighter than Tomaj, not laden with a lifetime of rage and disillusionment. Izsak was different, but the same. “Yes, that one. He is also a great student of the sciences, and has already discovered and named several plants and animals he’s sent on his own back to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Perhaps … if you were to stay for awhile … How long can you stay?”

  “As long as you wish, my dear Countess.”

  “Do you dance the Viennese waltz?”

  “But, of course! I am only the best in Vienna, Pest-Buda, and London!”

  Dagny steered him back up the path to the house. “No, only the second best, Izsak. Well, perhaps you’re the best in London, I’ll give you that.”

  She enjoyed looking up at his fine, aristocratic Ashkenazi profile. She had a strange sensation of comfort and serenity she had not felt in years.

  AUTHORS NOTE

  Saint Mary’s, or the Île Sainte-Marie, is an island off the east coast of Madagascar, already a thriving pirate sanctuary and made famous by Henry Every in 1695 after he plundered two Indian treasure ships of their gold and gems. Every’s legend caught the imagination of Americans and Europeans, and the island became the subject of fancifully inaccurate songs and plays. In 1713, Every was the hero of The Successful Pirate, a stage play at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. In my book, the tune reproduced so beautifully by Zaleski’s healthy pipes and termed The Wonderful Pirate is from that play.

  I set Tomaj Balásházy’s plantation, Barataria (named after Jean Lafitte’s “Kingdom of Barataria”), on the mainland due west of this island for one practical reason: I just couldn’t see everyone constantly taking boats back and forth to get there. So I gave him a splendid grand Louisiana mansion, and a three-story tall glass-house, even though Cindy Vallar told me that was ridiculous on the Madagascar coast—the entire island was already a greenhouse. “Why not have a glass-house?” I said. “Maybe he wants one. Tomaj can do anything. He’s a pirate!”

  Pirates can do anything they want. I believe that’s behind our continuing obsession with them, the idea that they were sort of like seafaring clowns with hearts of gold who ransacked but never maimed or murdered. Young Hector Bellingham gives a good succinct oral history of pirates when he tells Dagny that Tomaj “ain’t half as much a miscreant villain as that Edward Low, what tied the Portagee friars to the foremast, letting them down several times afore they was dead! He cut off another Portagee’s lips and broiled them before his own eyes! Why, he murdered men from good humor just as much from passion. He finally crashed his own quartermaster while the cove was taking a caulk in his hammock. Or L’Ollonais, who cut the breast of a Spaniard, pulled out his heart, and munched it!”

  The felicitous thing I discovered about the Saint Mary’s raiders, who came for the most part from North America or England, is that they successfully created a democratic, egalitarian society, accepting the Malagasy into their fold, and maintained harmonious communication with colonial governors. They don’t appear to have even fought much among themselves.

  As regards sea shanties, they were sung shipboard to facilitate certain tasks. They were working songs, a true art form in danger of disappearing until Stan Hugill collected them in one edition, Shanties from the Seven Seas. I know that Jono Spiro would disapprove of me having my people singing working shipboard songs when they’re on land. But the shanties are so vastly beautiful, I had to fit them in whenever anyone was in danger of bursting out into song. There’s a magnificent tradition here that shouldn’t be ignored, and we must pay credit to “the aged mariners who are still among us.”

  In choosing to write about Madagascar, I swiftly realize
d that the history of the place was replete with “strange extinct animals, sprouting a wild assortment of endemic beings found nowhere else: fragile orchids that could only live under glass, coral masquerading as swords and lace, mythical underground caverns where translucent blind fish bumped into rocks and animals without backbones fell over, and the crowning oddity of them all: the aberrant and oft-murdered aye-aye, supposed to be a squirrelly rodent…”

  So I put the political history of Madagascar onto a back burner and dove into the natural history. The trondro that Dagny describes as a “Cretaceous fish” was actually the coelacanth, not described until 1836 by the naturalist Louis Agassiz.

  For my pirate crew, it was at once evident I would not draw from William Dampier, Jean Lafitte, or William Kidd. No, the actors playing my pirates jumped immediately into their new costumes in the forms of David Bowie (Zaleski), my favorite cooking show guy (Youx [Anthony Bourdain, a hilarious author as well as chef]), and, most naturally, that shoeshine guy from the Police Squad! TV shows (Slushy the Bootblack). At first I felt a bit sheepish admitting these were my inspirations, and not figures from more hallowed annals such as Benito de Soto, Edward Low, or Sir Henry Morgan. I thought, Oh, this is going to look real good. Suddenly my main influence is ‘that shoeshine guy from Police Squad!’?

  To my credit, I hope, I did model Tomaj’s brother after István Széchenyi, the great Hungarian statesman.

  In a way, you can never really invent a person like the shoeshine guy (I think his name was Johnny). Shoeshine guys seem to exist in their own hallowed realm, where they are forever imparting deathless words of wisdom from the corners of their mouths. It’s comforting to believe so, anyway.

  A COMPENDIUM OF THE VUIGAR TONGUE

  (with apologies to Captain Grose)