The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

  He was the wealthiest man on the coast, and could build a glass-house if he so desired.

  Since his meeting with the magical American naturalist, Tomaj had taken to strolling about the central nave of the glasshouse, hands behind his back, wondering at the names of the trees, vines, and shrubberies. Perhaps, if he could convince her to return to Barataria, he could have her write down the names in Latin, and the ironmonger could make plates to place at the base of each plant, identifying them.

  He hadn’t succeeded in forgetting about the American siblings. The woman was all the more maddening for her devilishly curious insistence on having a secret beau, a fact Tomaj was beginning to doubt. If she were his paramour, he would be announcing it from the highest mountain, not covering such a splendid woman in shame! Any of the half-baked Frenchmen or insipid British missionaries would be parading her about the sandy streets of Tamatave in the finest gowns of Paris, cashmere shawls, and the most monumental Christmas centerpiece hats imaginable! So then, who was the swain? Tomaj was of the opinion he did not exist at all, that the mademoiselle had quite a different reason for not desiring him.

  Now, during an unusual September downpour, he’d come to the glass-house to paint. He’d already done the underpainting of the East Indiaman they’d recently sacked off Sumatra. He was pleased with the feathery palms of the skyline, the way the tattered sails hung from the spars of The Anatolia, the dying man swinging from the top, the manner in which she was hooked yardarm to yardarm with Stormalong, and best of all, he’d ground a pervenche shade of blue from calcined cobalt to paint the taffrail. Perhaps he could question that enjoyable miner brother of Miss Ravenhurst if he’d seen any malachite about, as that would make a fine addition to the green bice color he desired for some seas.

  As he worked, he sang.

  Aft on the quarterdeck our gallant captain stands,

  Staring out to sea with a spyglass in his hand,

  What he is a-thinking of we know very well,

  He’s thinking more of shortening sail than striking the bell.

  From the corner of his eye, between the balls of a puffy pink-flowered shrub, Tomaj saw movement of a striped form. Flinging his brush onto the palette, he shot to his feet in time to view Slushy behind the streaming water that ran down the glass-house walls. Slushy was struggling across the clearing toward the main house, dragging a clutch of long matchlocks.

  Slushy! Exactly the man he wanted to see.

  Bounding through the verdant undergrowth to the front door, Tomaj raced onto the lawn waving his arms. “Slushy! Come in out of the rain!”

  Slushy must have seen him, yet turned to struggle onward with what was increasingly looking like a bundle of wood.

  “Slushy! Are you deaf, man? Come into the glass-house!”

  Recognizing defeat, the impish bootblack man slumped and dragged his wood into the glass-house.

  “Have you got a kink in your head?” demanded Tomaj, knowing full well that Slushy did. He now recalled the last time he’d seen Slushy, when Tomaj had perhaps behaved in a manner aligned with creating the shaking man’s current terror. “Come now, man, come have a tot of Armagnac. Are you cooking with Ramonja tonight? He’s still got a haunch of that bullock someone brought in a few nights ago, and you could make that delectable aspic of Chinese dates with tarragon from the—well, now, what’s this?” Tomaj gestured at the wooden object.

  Slushy shivered beyond all reason, for it was pleasantly warm out on this stormy tropical afternoon. “It’s a wooden stand, for coats and jackets, and suchlike.”

  “Well, I can see that, but—all right, never mind, come over here.” Setting the coat stand upright, Tomaj put a hand on Slushy’s shoulder and steered him to his easel, ducking underneath various branches and fronds that dripped calming humidity. “Now, as to your mission. Have you had any news on the good mademoiselle from America?”

  Slushy waited until Tomaj had poured a goodly tumbler of brandy, and he swallowed the entirety of it, holding the glass out for more. He warmed up then, looking from side to side furtively, as though aye-ayes were lurking in the bushes, waiting to leap out and sink their bat-like claws into his neck. “It’s like this, Cap’n,” he whispered, though he had no need to. “She lives with her two brothers in a fancy cottage in Tamatave, the one old Hastings lived in before he was taken with the French fever and expired, and lay there for a week bloating before anyone noticed, and the rats started—”

  “Yes, yes!”

  Slushy inhaled another glass of the valuable brandy. “The word on the street is that they’re really from New York, not Pennsylvania as she originally claimed. Several theories abound as to why she goes to such lengths to conceal her origins from you, the foremost being that perhaps she was acquainted with you in New York, and has followed you all the way from—”

  Tomaj flung an exasperated arm. “Oh, by the blood of my ancestors! I’ve never heard anything so lamebrained in my life! Slushy, as you yourself recall, there are tens of thousands of people from New York, why in God’s name would she be following me? Now, tell me the rest. Of the real story.”

  Sidling up closer—Slushy’s little head came up to about Tomaj’s bicep—he imparted from the corner of his mouth, “One brother is that dandy who came to Barataria—he’s all right. Everyone likes him, he gives pretty stones to the kids. But the other brother, that’s surely a different story. Word is that he screams and yells, and has been seen in the front of the cottage in the middle of the night invoking some kind of medieval god by waving masks and things that look suspiciously like ethnological—”

  “Oh, why do I even bother with you?” Throwing up his hands, Tomaj walked in frustrated circles. “I give you one simple commission and you have to shaft me with all this moonshine about ethnological masks? Perhaps I should’ve entrusted someone more reliable, like Broadhecker or Bellingham, someone who can—”

  “What’s that?” Slushy hissed.

  The front glass doors of the house banged. No wind blew today, so Tomaj shoved Slushy behind the fluffy pink shrubbery, whispering fiercely, “Get down, and cheese it!”

  Slushy dove dramatically into the bushes and Tomaj headed for the front doors.

  Slushy whispered loudly, “Tomaj! The coat stand!”

  “What?”

  It was too late, a wave of fresh air entered the glass-house, and Tomaj straightened his spine and approached down the pathway.

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Dagny said gaily. “I thought I heard you speaking to someone.”

  She was all aglow in a burgundy gown with gigot sleeves, and the zone belt with a pointed center cinched her figure to great advantage. Her hat today, though not glorious by the standards set by her former Christmas centerpiece, was a grand concoction, with long tartan ribbons and ostrich feathers dyed royal red. Despite her frilly parasol, rain had soaked the hem of her garments. How could he have survived so long without her?

  “Miss Ravenhurst,” Tomaj said raptly, pressing his lips to her gloved hand.

  When she looked down at his feet in obeisance, he couldn’t see her refulgent face, and the feathers of her hat tickled his nose. “You have company? I heard a woman call you ‘Tomaj.’”

  “Oh, you did? Well, she went out the back door with the laundry. Tomaj is the name for those most familiar with me.”

  “There’s a back door to this lovely arboretum? Then I shall not take familiarities, and call you Count Balásházy from now on.”

  Tomaj still held her hand to his mouth, and took her parasol from her. “No, no, malala, that will never do. Call me Tomaj. I’ve been eagerly awaiting your return.” Malala meant “beloved,” and felt appropriate to Tomaj.

  “Why is there a coat stand there? Now, dear Count—Tomaj—you simply must tell me what spirit possessed you to build a conservatory of this grand nature. Was it some voice from beyond the veil that commanded you to build an Eden, or something would smite you down?”

  Tomaj had never been happier. She had come to
see him! “I knew you’d be coming,” he said, casually hanging the parasol by the handle over the coat stand, “and I wanted to be prepared for such a blissful eventuality by planting any tree, shrub, or vine that I thought might catch your interest.”

  Miss Ravenhurst kept her eyes down as she walked a circle around him, untying her hat from beneath her chin. “I believe I must keep an Argus eye on you then, my dear … Tomaj.” She seemed to take vast delight in saying his Christian name aloud, buzzing her tongue in the Hungarian manner around the letter j. “For you must have greatly penetrating prescience to have known I was coming so far beforehand as to have planted these Dypsis tsaravoasira.” She slung her hat over another coat stand peg and regarded him impudently.

  His heart was stabbed by grace in a way that had not invaded its cold carapace in fourteen years. Her face was guileless and open, as though she’d never known a tragedy, nor suspected him of being the cause of any.

  “Ah,” he said stupidly. “The palms?”

  Nobody looked up at the palms.

  “Yes. They grow so tall they’re smashing against the glass ceiling—someone must trim them, or they’ll break your glass. Oh, and what’s …?”

  Tomaj was stunned when she abruptly came toward him, her hand uplifted as if to touch his face. Her gloved hand stopped just short of touching his mouth, and she smiled fondly.

  “You have a spot of green, right … there.”

  Green? “Oh, ah.” Tomaj felt himself redden as he lifted his hand to wipe the smudge of bitter terra verde paint from the corner of his mouth, and he looked sheepishly at her feet. “I was just … painting.”

  “Painting?” Miss Ravenhurst looked above to the barrel-vaulted transept roof. “Is that why you’re attired so handsomely in your day-shirt and no waistcoat?”

  Was she being flirtatious? Tomaj was instantly glad he still wore—admittedly, a casual and somewhat dingy—cravat of red merino, but always neglected to don even an ordinary waistcoat when painting for fear of soiling it. To take the focus off of his embarrassing faux pas in habiliments, he affected a laugh and strode to his easel in the central plaza of the glass-house. “Yes, painting! You see that I enjoy painting in here. It’s extremely soothing to the spirit to be able to paint au naturel, as it were, in any sort of weather, and to be undisturbed by rain, fog, or even by cover of night, if I light enough lanterns in here.”

  Miss Ravenhurst followed. “And best, no mosquitoes.” Her flippant aura evaporated when she laid eyes on his Sumatran painting. She gasped aloud, bringing her gloved hand to her mouth, her eyes round. She gazed up at him tentatively, then back to the painting, as though the two sights were not compatible together.

  Tomaj became nervous again—damn the minx for affecting him in ways no other woman had been capable of!—and sauntered off to retrieve Slushy’s brandy tumbler from the sandy floor. She was so engrossed in the painting she didn’t notice him wiping the sand from the tumbler on the leg of his trousers, and he set it next to his own tumbler on the occasional table where he poured more firewater.

  He handed her his own glass of brandy, which she accepted absently, as though communicating with razana, a collective body of ancestral spirits Malagasy often meditated upon. At last she turned to him and exclaimed, “I’m flabbergasted! You—you—it is just not something I would have expected from you!”

  Tomaj fiercely gulped his brandy, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand in the manner in which she’d discouraged her brother two weeks ago. “Yes? And what were you expecting me to paint? Children being sacrificed to Molech?”

  “What? Oh, why, no, dear Tomaj, that’s not what I meant at all! I meant that you’re such a solid and down-to-earth man, a man of business, a forceful and powerful man of commerce, I hardly expected to discover you had an artistic side. It’s very refreshing and … stimulating.”

  Oh. Now Tomaj was ashamed for having been so easily riled. Stimulating, she said. He could hardly have been more stimulated had she rent open her bodice and rubbed her bursting breasts over his torso. “Well, ships are hardly my only subject.” Grabbing his sketchbook from where it was propped on another easel, Tomaj flipped down the drawing of The Anatolia he’d been working from, turning pages back until he found a figure study of Holy Eleanora Brown.

  “Oh, my!” Dagny gasped. “You do people, as well! Did you ever turn this sketch into a full oil painting?”

  “No, I was just jacking around, there not being many comely women on this island to paint.”

  She regarded him with childishly shining eyes. “Then you were the one who drew the self-portrait that hangs in your reception room! The one of you, as a child, in a tenement. It was just a fantastic fanciful drawing—symbolic, perhaps? Some inner poverty …”

  “That drawing? Ah, no. The artist who drew that was my most inspirational teacher ever. My mother.” He spoke rapidly then, so as not to draw too much attention to his statement. “She hailed from Pest-Buda in Hungary, and might I be so bold as to request an honor from you? Will you sit for me, for just a few moments, that I might sketch you? Just for the fun of it, as we’re stuck here in this downpour, and can relax with our brandies.”

  “An honor? Oh, it would be a pure joy, Count.”

  He poured her more brandy and led her to a tall stool where she could sit at ease with profile in three-quarters. He walked around her regarding her features from all angles in the diffuse lighting. “A portrait for your beau, perhaps?”

  Her reaction was like a shot. “Oh, no!” Giggling, she tempered her remark. “I mean, he isn’t an appreciator of fine art. He’s more a … mechanically inclined soul.”

  “No?” Approaching her, Tomaj dared to touch her bare neck just under her ear, lifting the heavy curtain of sausage-like ringlets she had fashioned and letting one slither through his fingers. She didn’t avert her gaze from his face, so he was emboldened to say, “You’re an enchanting woman, Miss Ravenhurst. You have the type of steadfast beauty that will age well. You shall not be a pinched old bitch rapping people across the hands when they take the last mango from the bowl”—he slid an ivory comb from the mountain of curls and twisted the entirety of them into a high bun, so as to leave her neck entirely naked, cinching the whole mass again with the comb—”nor will you walk around like a mummy entombed in layers of constricting and damaging bonnets, collars, stays, and those awful caps that make old women look like—well, like old women.”

  “Ah.” She seemed to agree.

  His fingers came round her collarbone to slip open the buttons of the lace collar and her pelerine. It was odd, the trust people placed in him when he acted as a professional artist. He had done many magnificent nude studies and paintings of his former quartermaster, a most majestic specimen of maleness who had become impassioned by the ministrations Tomaj lavished upon him.

  “If that’s true, then it is I who should be sketching you, for you are a quite … remarkable man.”

  Perhaps it took a certain vainglory to lounge back like a proud satyr reveling in the idea that your image would be displayed in all its rigid glory upon the walls of foreign dignitaries, but then Yves had been such a veritable David, Tomaj’s appetite for him so complete, and paintings of him the most widely coveted throughout the world. He had not had a decent model since then …

  His prick swelled when his fingertips brushed her bare collarbone. “No, my malala. It is you who are the center of this arboreal universe, you who will be the most lovely subject my brush has ever graced.” His disappointment that, without her collar and cape, only the uppermost swell of her succulent breasts were displayed did not prevent his prick from filling out his trousers in such an uncomfortable manner, he was compelled to pretend he had to piss behind some trees. In truth, due to his rampant erection he could not piss, and he merely muzzled the obstinate thing under the waistband of his trousers.

  As he bent at the knees to make the correct adjustments to his stuffed crotch, he realized he felt anger. Anger at the unknown swain who pre
vented him from acting on his impulses with the delightful Quaker lady, if indeed such a swain existed. Attachments of this nature had never prevented Tomaj from indulging in some delicious screwing with the few white women who ventured to the island. Indeed, he’d enjoyed several duels for this reason. He was “The Nefarious King of the Betsimisaraka” and had no lofty standing to lose due to such ignominious events. Duels had never annoyed him, for he did not fear death.

  As he strolled back to his easel, the sight of her naked neck affected him in some dusty recess of his jaded soul. He knew he could never pet her with a crude hand. Despite her bravery in coming to this faraway isle, she had a naïve innocence that required his protection, not his disregard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE RUSSIAN SLIME

  DAGNY SHIVERED AS THE COUNT APPROACHED FROM behind. When he’d brushed her collarbone with his deformed finger, she’d shivered down to her quim, her nipples stiffening painfully. What was it about this cultured, aristocratic gentleman that drove her to distraction? She could not stop casting covetous glances at his body, muscular yet so painfully thin he almost seemed to vanish when he turned sideways. She had enjoyed romping and playing with Monsieur Boneaux with such a bold physicality it was almost a lawn sport, but the imagining of this … the count’s face with his pterodactyl beak nudging against her breasts set her so atwitter she could not focus on normal conversation, and … If she once indulged in onanism, nymphomania was the next natural step, an addiction leading to enervation and death.

  She had already finished her large tumbler of brandy, and the count, seeing this, came close to refill it. How flamboyant and spirited he looked with no waistcoat, the red cravat having been turned into a pirate’s belt about his slender hips and knotted jauntily to bind up … oh, my.