The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

  Still, they didn’t halt at the racket, and Dagny felt no fear, for the fetching dog was clearly only barking at a strange white woman. But now Izaro lunged for her, wresting the tulip tree from her fingers and heaving the entire hat over the side of the chair.

  Dagny bore cutlasses into him with accusing eyes as he lounged back into the seat, wiping sweat from his brow as though he’d just endured a keelhauling and lived to tell the tale. “You,” she seethed. “You’ve always hated that hat.”

  “Mademoiselle!” Izaro cried in a falsetto, displaying an explanatory palm at the dog that was now once again sitting placidly like a cuddly toy, its ruff of bronze and vermilion streaked like a lion’s mane.

  They trotted through narrow streets of bamboo huts perched on stilts and thatched with palm leaves. Dagny knew these miserable hovels to contain only one room almost entirely taken up by a fireplace, so that the family scarcely had room to sleep. She didn’t know how they even breathed in the smoky dens, where the glassless weather window was always kept shuttered. No doubt this perplexing man she followed squatted in one of the better of these lairs, one of those with two rooms and smooth ebony floors, next to a low house where native arrack was sold.

  Around the next row of artistic traveler’s trees, twenty-foot-tall symmetrical palms with canoe-like bracts that resembled a line of enormous Algonquin helmets of radiated feathers, was a curious tall hedgerow beyond which Dagny could see nothing. The rectangular erect bushes grew together into a sort of dense wall behind which the inscrutable count vanished, legions of his apparently devoted servants scurrying in his wake. They were the soldierly type Dagny had often seen attending to governors of different provinces, wearing the white salaka cloth around the loins over which their cartouche boxes were fastened by thick black belts. Dagny wondered why the count’s attendants were armed with muskets and spears.

  “Do you know this man, Izaro?”

  Izaro nodded his head briefly, as though constricted in some kind of medieval torture machine.

  “And …?”

  He moved his jaw only enough to get the words out. “He is called the Traveling Bird. This plantation is called Barataria.”

  The bearers carried them behind the first hedgerow, and Dagny saw there were many possible portals for them to choose from, the entire maze being like the ones she’d heard of at Kensington Gardens, where children were sometimes lost and never seen again. “Traveling Bird? I’ve never heard such Irish bull in my entire life! Why would he travel, when he’s the master of this estate?”

  The bearers knew exactly which egress to choose, leading them into a farrago of more neatly trimmed hedgerows, some of them pared into animal shapes. The bear-dog gazed placidly at the bushes, its tongue lolling, its fur rippling with the gait of the bearers.

  Izaro let some more words out. “Traveling because his name is Pellegrin. Is it not like some great bird in your country who flies far?”

  Dagny shivered. Her petticoats were stuck miserably to her legs. “And who is his wife?”

  Izaro was silent for a long time. At every turn of the maze, Dagny imagined she saw the cinnabar flash of the coat the boy had handed the count, just the flap of the coat-tails before he was gone around another corner. She recalled a fairy book she’d owned as a child …

  Izaro exhaled with force. “Hmph. He has ten great guns in this fort.”

  “Fort? What are you—oh!”

  Their cavalcade emerged into a vast clearing. The arboricultural explosion was astounding, as though they’d entered an Eden painting. A wide architectural lawn the color of the count’s irises was so brilliant as to hurt Dagny’s eyes, fringed by acacias and casuarinas interspersed with lacy sago trees. They headed for a long arbor that covered the road, formed into a tunnel from the passion-flowers that ensconced it, and Dagny saw the count waiting for them. He leaned casually on the tunnel of interlaced bamboo branches, his smile sly and knowing.

  “Mijanona! Mandra-pihaona!” Stop! I will see you later on! Dagny cried to the bearers, at the same moment the copper bear-dog lunged from the palanquin-chair in such an abandoned jump that Dagny was bowled into the road.

  She fell into a border of flowering pale noisette intermingled with vibrant russelia juncea, the likes of which she’d never seen, usually only flourishing in artificial heat. Here the beauteous gems clearly luxuriated in the thermal bowl of air that encased the island, and Dagny was content to stay on her knees in the flowerbed, inhaling deeply of the mulch.

  “Ah,” she breathed when the four-fingered elegant hand appeared to tenderly remove the blossoms from her face. He was a dull silhouette against the periwinkle sheet of sky. Dagny allowed him to return the flowers to their beds, and she stood.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “I’ve only read of russelia juncea, and seen an engraving in Paxton’s Dictionary.”

  “Ah,” the count agreed in that odd Russian burr. “I see your incomprehensible, indescribable hat has taken a journey, as my dog couldn’t stand the encounter of a full-dressed fine lady.”

  Oh, yes, her hat. “What a loss—” Dagny said, but was stopped by the splendent brimming of his eyes as he smiled down at her.

  It made her dizzy, the way he gazed at her with impudent lack of expectation. She was accustomed to men staring at her with lust in their putrid souls, but this one had a purity of spirit she’d never encountered, and didn’t quite trust. She’d had meetings with hundreds of men, to the point where even turning her head to anything that walked with a lobcock was enough to send her into shudders of disgust, and to dive back into her greenhouse studies, where blue ageratum mexicanum made her feel happier than any sideboard laden with exquisite delights of the palate.

  “You enjoy my garden.”

  They strolled under the arbor. Dagny enclosed his hand in hers, caressing the stump of his refined finger where he had a ring of celestine. “Yes, I’ve studied botany for many years. It’s a great inspiration to me.”

  He walked as though accustomed to posing for paintings, the thigh of his nankeen trousers brushing against the damp curtains of her skirts. “That accounts for your knowledge of Latin, but where are you from in the United States, Mademoiselle Ravenhurst?”

  Mademoiselle Ravenhurst! “But how …”

  “Because no properly wed husband would allow a wife to gallivant about falling from branches.”

  Dagny tossed her sodden head. “I was raised with the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and my father was a great naturalist. I’ve heard there are unusual animals on this island, Count…”

  “Unusual. You can certainly say that.”

  “For instance, I am convinced the flightless dodo pigeon may still be found in the forests, contrary to some claims the last one was eaten in the Mauritius a hundred years ago.”

  “Two hundred years ago, and only in the Mauritius. Never here.”

  “But it simply must be here. Natives have told me they’ve witnessed a giant flightless bird that seems to resemble an ostrich, from their description of things. But my most longed-for quarry is the hideous and ghastly aye-aye monkey.”

  “The secretive aye-aye is a rodent, akin to a squirrel.”

  “I believe it to be a lemur. And what of you, kind Count? You who have saved me from being eaten alive by a fish long extinct? Where do you hail from? You have a delightful accent—”

  “New York,” he said, suddenly cold, looking straight ahead at nothing.

  So she’d been right in her assessment that he was from New York. His superb profile, the arching aquiline nose, the nostrils of which seemed cavernously absurd, all fit together in a sort of oddly wondrous portrait of a man she wanted to know intimately.

  She had never felt this before. She had always wished men would just go away.

  A resonant bark came from the house—there was a proper house, not a miserable hut!—and the dog-bear sat amiably with those fluffy muffs on each side of its head. The dog seemed to say, “Woof! Come and see my house, please!”

/>   Dagny felt the count soften. He crouched down and spread his arms wide. The dog leapt in a few flowing silky bounds into its master’s arms, and Dagny was filled with delight to see the dog nearly bowl him over.

  The dog kissed the count’s flawless face.

  Dagny bent down with delight, crying, “There’s that dog again! And where did you find him?”

  “Her,” laughed the count, in a fine ballet with the huge creature, who made sure to sidestep each of the count’s long limbs with its own furry ones, gigantic as though she wore snowshoes, never harming her master with her great bulk. They tussled on the lawn, the master allowing the giant dog to overwhelm him, and when he lay back, the way he turned his head with delight from the behemoth’s mouth made Dagny want to kiss him.

  “And what is her name?”

  “Stormalong.”

  “Tomaj!”

  A maiden waited on the steps of the lofty and spacious plantation house, white coralline pillars extending two stories, fieldstone bricks painted yellow in one wing, red in another. The count rose at the sound of her voice.

  Stormalong sat at attention when the woman called from the wide steps. A nauseating feeling wormed tentacles into Dagny’s stomach. This was the wife. She was clearly a Betsimisaraka, the people who inhabited this sultry eastern coast of the island, with her high cheekbones, eyes clear and bright under beautifully arched brows. She was an angular, gaunt thing, unlike Dagny herself, who had chosen to overcome all reminders of poverty by sating herself at the sideboard of gustatory felicity. Dressed in an awkward French style, her glossy jet black hair was arranged in braids and knots.

  She clapped her hands together as a child, and cried out something joyous in French, something Dagny didn’t understand, there not being too many opportunities to speak French in Pennsylvania, or in the neighborhoods of New York she had lived in later. The count went toward his wife, his countenance suddenly shaded with a curtain of disdain.

  “Come now, Ellie,” he said with a scornful toss of the head. “You know I wish you to speak English. We are not from France.”

  Dagny tried to ignore that dark aspect to him. She didn’t want this count to be anything less than a fantastic prince of the fairy book she’d found on the street as a child, but now this glorious garden of Kew took on the feeling of the evil enchantress’s vegetable garden where grew the desirable rampion. “I will willingly go away with thee, but I do not know how to get down …” Perhaps this anthropomorphic bear-dog was really a person, cocking her head so intelligently at her master’s side, as the wife visibly shrank back and lost her joyous demeanor.

  Ellie spoke haltingly, her hands together as in prayer. “I … am happy to see you. I just wish … to tell you … Ramonja says strawberries and quinine are finished, so … for tea it will be mangoes and … peaches.”

  Chuckling arrogantly, the count waved a hand at her. “Never mind tea, Ellie, this is my new friend, Mademoiselle Ravenhurst of Pennsylvania, the United States.” He did not give his wife the honor of a return introduction. “There was a bit of a squall down in the harbor, and she needs some dry clothes. I’m sure there’s something suitable around here.”

  Not only had he just outright fabricated some outlandish bit of balderdash—how could it have been raining in the harbor, with only one tiny cloud in the sky?—but he turned to Dagny and gazed down on her imperiously, as though he, too, had been imagining licking her mouth, and found her as delightful as a partridge wing.

  Dagny envisioned him, his long locks as silky and black as Egypt, unbound and rippling over an astrakhan rug, her crouching like a bended animal drinking at a trough, her mouth closing down on his.

  She didn’t blush in the slightest, and she held his gaze, her lower jaw going a little slack. Then she felt fat and foolish. Her manners and appearance could never compare to this refined Malagasy woman! Why was he looking at her like that?

  Dagny was glad when Ellie gently took her hand and led her up the stairs to the grand entrance, crowded by various hirelings. At least ten of these men swathed in different attitudes of the white lamba scarf approached the count, importuning him for various favors and tasks. Ten refined Malagasy women waited in the foyer, hands folded before their aproned laps, making little mute curtseys to Dagny. Ellie introduced them variously as Moll, Kate, Sue, and Peg. Flowery, spacious air seemed to waft from their persons.

  The strangest sight of all was a white man lurking under an elaborate ebony spiral staircase that led to a lofty landing. He gazed straight at Dagny, his aquamarine blue eyes squinting, his dirty blond hair enwrapped in a long silk scarf, the pennants tossed insouciantly over his shoulders. He was clad in a quilted sleeveless vest embroidered in gold tissue of oriental workmanship, and he wore almost as much jewelry as his master himself, dangling bracelets of coins and necklaces of amber.

  Oddest of all, he suddenly burst into a quavering tenor.

  Where is the trader of London town?

  His gold’s on the capstan

  His blood’s on his gown

  Up and away for Mavasarona Bay

  Where the liquor is good and the lasses are gay.

  What in the name of hell was this beetle-brain going on about …? Dagny had no time to ponder, for she was swept by a bevy of the quiet, dignified women up the staircase, the banister hung with tiger skins from India.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE OBEDIENT SERVANT

  FUSSING OVER THE TEA IN THE RECEPTION ROOM LIKE, as his cabin boy Bellingham gently put it, an old chatterbox at a bun-fight, Tomaj waved off all servants other than the man who whisked flies away with a green bough, and the one who scared feral dogs away from the open doors. On a dining table, an epergne held peaches and cold mangrove oysters from down the coast near Fort Dauphin. Tomaj agonized over a selection of six Madeira wines he lined up on the sideboard, observing the pleasing row with gimlet eyes.

  Though the woman who had dropped from the sky claimed to be a Quaker, he could see nothing of the ascetic in her demeanor. She appeared lusty, full of vigor, a bit cockish in her gros de Naples gown, a tasty doxy despite her ornamented hat that would shame his Christmas Eve table centerpiece. Though she be unwed, when she’d opened her eyes to utter those words in Latin, he’d seen what she looked like on her back, utterly relaxed in his arms, and only his fear of stifling the remaining life from her prevented him from kissing her delectable mouth. She was not insensate to a man’s charms, and when she’d walked with him and stroked the heinous stump of his finger, he knew she was educated in the joys of screwing. It would be pleasant to consort with a white woman again …

  “Aye. A devilish rum prize you plucked yourself from the drink today, Balásházy.”

  Tomaj spun around. “Zaleski. What in blue blazes are you skulking around here for?”

  Zaleski was frighteningly handy with a boarding axe and a marline spike in the eye socket. He’d been impressed into the Royal Navy despite his protestations that he was, variously, an employee of a sovereign dockyard, a carpenter building a lighthouse, or a harpooner in a Greenland fishery—all occupations that rendered one exempt from impressment. Snatched out of port anyway by the hot press gang, he’d been at sea ever since. He’d been claiming for so long he had not yet reached his eighteenth birthday, it was time for him to begin asserting he’d passed his fifty-fifth.

  “I brung you this.” Zaleski flipped Tomaj’s sketchbook at him as though it was a giant playing card, and Tomaj snatched it gingerly, examining it for dirty fingerprints. “That were a gallant dive you made into the drink, and to pluck such a pretty penny from the ocean like hooking a mermaid, I’d think you should get the Humane Society gold medal.”

  “Oh, gammon and spinnage! What are you bleating on about? The day I need a medal for doing what none of you lack-brains could rouse yourselves to do—oh, now what?”

  Tomaj slapped his sketchbook onto the table with frustration at the sight of Slushy’s pinched visage peering round the doorjamb. The diminutive bootblack boy
resembled a rat, the way his nose twitched as he clung to the wall, his spindly cadaverous fingers feeling about, like the horrifying aye-aye rodent of the midnight forest. “Away with you! Can’t you see I’m trying to have tea? And with a real, cultured lady, not nincompoops such as you who think the apex of refinement is rubbing kippers in the caboose.”

  Zaleski loomed even closer. His betel-stained teeth nauseated Tomaj. “Slushy’s got a proposal. I think it’d behoove you to hear him out.”

  Tomaj shouted, “Oh, I don’t have the damned time to—” The gaggle of whispering ramatoas were on the gallery landing outside the reception room, and Tomaj grabbed Slushy by the breast of his idiotic striped frock and pulled him into the room. “Spit it out, man, and be quick!”

  Miss Ravenhurst was on the landing, her hair plumped up into a semblance of its former coiffure, chaffered up in Peg’s old toilette. “What is it? Tell me, or I’ll never let you in Ramonja’s kitchen again!”

  Horror washed over Slushy’s face, and he whispered rapidly from the corner of his mouth, “See, here’s the deal. I’ve got a flea in the ear that I can find out what’s up with your watery mermaid. If you just give me room to swing a cat, I’ll stake you my affidavit that within a fortnight I can deliver the complete buzz on your soggy siren. I can guarantee that—”

  Tomaj cried, “Oh, take off, would you?” In disgust, he went to the sideboard and poured himself a Madeira that he had already deemed unworthy for the occasion. “If I stood around listening to your numbskull ideas I’d be a pathetic old clinchpoop marooned on an island with only a fishwife for company!” Turning to face the two dolts, Tomaj flung his free arm at them. “So clew it up! Get back into the kitchen! No, wait, we don’t need to poison any more innocent people. Go pay a visit to your wives!”

  The duo turned, muttering indecipherable oaths, and Tomaj exhaled mightily, straightening his waistcoat. He tried to rearrange his face into a semblance of a smile, but Zaleski paused under the doorway. “One more thing I just heard when you was practicing for your Humane Society medal. Seems that Wenkai Zhang’s brother Panjoo has been transported from Bombay to the Mauritius. He arrived there last week.” Zaleski sarcastically saluted Tomaj. “Just thought Mine Nabob would like to know.”