The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Read online

  PREVIOUS ACCOLADES FOR KAREN MERCURY:

  “THE HINTERLANDS is a wonderful historical tale, which is amazingly told by author Karen Mercury. THE HINTERLANDS is the first book I’ve read from Karen Mercury, but it certainly won’t be the last.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “This is an intense book [THE HINTERLANDS] that captures the historical significance of this chapter in African and British history. This is a well-developed novel that shouldn’t be missed by history buffs who like a good adventure story.”

  —The Romance Reader’s Connection

  “Fantastic Historical Tale! THE HINTERLANDS is a fantastic historical tale that brings to life the Kingdom of Benin at the point when Britain begins efforts to colonize the nation using brute force. The romance between the lead couple is deftly handled, but takes a back seat to the astute intense look at the late nineteenth century Guinea Coast. Karen Mercury provides genre fans with a triumphant tale that will send the audience seeking more such reflective works.”

  —H. Klausner, Independent Reviewer

  “Ms. Mercury has penned a very sensual and descriptive read that fans of historic fiction will not want to miss. This story [THE HINTERLANDS] really brought to my mind the movie “African Queen”. As a fan of historical fiction I enjoy visiting locations that are new and different. This read surely fit the bill. I highly recommend Ms. Mercury. She is truly an author that bears watching in the future.”

  —K. Ahlers, www.romancedesigns.com

  An exciting, unimaginably fast-moving tale of adventure.”

  —Dr. Richard Pankhurst,

  OBE The world’s #1 expert on Ethiopian history

  “THE FOUR QUARTERS OF THE WORLD is an amazing journey into a piece of history few Westerners are aware of. Considered by scholars to be one of Africa’s greatest rulers, Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia is brought to life in this adventurous, heart stopping tale. For a unique and entertaining read, I highly recommend THE FOUR QUARTERS OF THE WORLD.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “This is a very well written historical novel in which a great deal of care has been given to make it historically accurate. The characters are well developed and believable … Karen Mercury did a fantastic job of making the reader really feel that she were there with the flavor of the country and involved in this truly good story.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “… pace is excellent… (white-hot love scenes, anyone?)… descriptions of Abyssinia, of nomadic life at the court, and of the characters and their actions are fascinating and evocative … a life-like picture of a pivotal time in Ethiopia’s history.”

  —Claire Morris, Historical Novels Review, Issue 36, May, 2006

  “Mrs. Mercury has once again succeeded in drawing the reader into the hot and steamy world of Africa where all is not what it appears to be, and where — at least in the past — the misdeeds of decades could be redeemed with the heroism of the hour … this book will make wonderful reading for the many adults who enjoy historic fiction with a strong dose of romance.”

  —Sylvia Cochran, Round Table Reviews

  DEDICATION:

  For AB

  A vague idea I had as a child of a romantic, valiant, honest man who would devote or give his life to me

  Published 2007 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered tradmark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2007 by Karen Mercury

  Cover Illustration by Arturo Delgado and Adam Mock

  Interior Map Illustration by James Tampa

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Baskerville

  Printed in the United States of America

  10-digit ISBN: 1-9338360-2-4

  13-digit ISBN: 978-1-933836-02-7

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Cindy Vallar, the Pirate Lady

  Who thinks pirates in Madagascar probably

  shouldn’t live in glass-houses

  Dr. Dian H. Murray of Notre Dame

  For telling me about Ladrones

  The Stormalongs:

  Broos Campbell

  Marg Muir

  Joe O’Steen

  For bearing a hand

  (and telling me about the pointy end of the ship)

  Steve Huff (aka Ian McKendrick) of the

  Historical Maritime Combat Association

  Don’t let him near a marline spike.

  That random Illinoian, Sarah Johnson.

  Jono Spiro, Chaplain Powdermonkey O’Sullivan of ARRR!

  He slipped his cable off Cape Horn

  Close by the place he was born

  But now he’s dead and gone to rest

  Ay! Ay! Mister Stormalong!

  and

  The students of John Staples and LAGNAF

  For being such perfect Madagscar pirates.

  I couldn’t ask for better shipmates.

  HORATIO

  O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

  HAMLET

  And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN EXTINCT FISH

  August 1827

  Mavasarona Bay, Madagascar

  THE ORCHID WAS EXQUISITE.

  The coconut-hued petals of the Angraecum sesquipedale bounced like a ballerina’s twirling skirt as Dagny crawled with bated breath onto the branch of the tree. The largest, most delightful specimens grew twenty feet above the ground on trees not in the lushest areas of the rain forest, but in random straggling trees on the edges of woods. As it required considerable force to knock the heartbreakingly rare specimen from the branch, Dagny Ravenhurst crept like a limbless circus performer, and unfold
ed the clasp knife between her teeth. When she tried to whisper, “Come to me, my beautiful darling,” her words came out as the wheeze of the asthmatic. She was so intent on her prey, she drooled on the metal knife.

  Tentatively, one hand over the other like a torpid chameleon, her hands gripped the branches, hands tough from years of clinging to trees and waiting in suspended immobility for animals to appear. She was clad in the apex of Paris fashion. One of the joys of her newly elevated status in life was the employment she provided for a parade of laundresses.

  “Mademoiselle!” cried Izaro, her local plant and animal scout. Dagny didn’t want to look down, for surely she must be poised over the turquoise bath of the Indian Ocean by now, but she could imagine Izaro, tawny limbs akimbo with indignation, voluminous white lamba scarf slung across his bony shoulders. Under the shade of his wide, plaited reed hat, his screwed-up face always seemed to wonder, What is with this insane vazaha woman? She dresses like she’s attending a ball, yet she engages in the daily pursuit of a phantom miscalled pleasure. “Mora, mora!” Slowly, slowly. “That branch is much too weak for your … for you.”

  Crazy man, Dagny thought. He’s implying that I’m fat! I may be a bit more bountiful than some of those walking skeletons who promenade in Broadway in New York, but I believe that the business of man’s life is eating. The only reason I stayed in New York as long as I did was because most common councilmen believed indulging in delicious oysters caused sudden death if eaten in unlucky months that are without the letter R! So I remained behind in town to swallow the juicy dainties… and the canvass backs … macaronis … jellies … alamode beef…

  Dagny had no option in the matter. Most of her life she’d been in mortifying poverty. She’d worn the costumes more suited for a rag doll than an adult woman, men sobbing that her rib bones hurt their kingly figures, until she’d given up even looking in the larder at the roaches that devoured her last bite of biscuit. She—and her family of two brothers—shambled about like anatomical displays of bones, hiding their shame with ill-fitting burnooses and capes, their caved eyes like vortices of the sea that sucked men to their death. Passersby must have thought them denizens of opium dens, and that they might have been in their fantasies, but they could ill afford that luxury.

  Living was much improved now, and Dagny intended to indulge at the spoils of the grand table.

  The closer she came to the shivering, delicate sesquipedale, the more it resembled a fantastic bird of paradise in flight, with a long forked swallowtail, hummingbird’s head, and the strangely mammalian arms of a swooping bat. Not seen since 1822—at least not by vazaha or written in dry vazaha journals—Dagny thought of sending the orchid to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, or perhaps this institution she had only heard of the other day, gardens with the strange name of Pamplemousses, a few islands over on the Mauritius where the French ruled, only two days’ sail in a small schooner.

  “Missus!” Izaro whined. “Come back! We must call some of the coconut climbing boys to get that flower for you!”

  Her brother Salvatore was something of a naturalist, as well. Proclaiming that Malagasy rocks were the oldest under the sun, today he’d gone on an expedition to Iron Mountain to inspect some primitive and rude smelting furnaces. He worshipped his “rocks” with fanatical devotion, but it was all so adorable that Dagny was often fond of telling him he had rocks instead of brains.

  It was her own monomaniacal quest that had brought them here to the End of the World, an island detached from mainland Africa so many eons ago it had sprouted 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, though Dagny was skeptical of that, and imagined the thing of the same lemur family as the cuddly toylike monkeys that enjoyed taking the sun. It was met with dread superstition among Malagasy natives and no small wonder, with its batlike ears, ever-growing incisors that gnawed through coconut shells, skeletal hands with a frighteningly elongated middle finger for digging grubs from trunks, and, so it was rumored, an odor so funky one wished one were walking on the mephitis of the East River trash barge instead of standing next to this devil’s messenger.

  Then there was the carnivorous fossa cat as big as a panther, a terrible animal that killed rats and snakes by sticking its tail down a hole and farting.

  Dagny could lean a few inches closer and easily swipe the orchid where it adhered so tenaciously to the branch. If only rice were not the main staple of life on this island! She removed the slimy knife from her mouth and muttered, “Rice … rice pudding … rice syllabub … fried rice … Oh! I could live here forever, if only I could find civilized food worthy of a naturalist’s daughter!” If she raised the knife just so high, it was possible she would gain enough momentum to cleave the glorious orchid below the pedicel, and even if it fell to Izaro below, he was waiting to catch it in his net. “If only there were someone worthy in this backward bush! If only—”

  A sharp crack heralded Dagny’s precipitous plummet. Still clutching the knife, the fall was long enough, almost languorous in her retarded motion through the warm, feathery pillows of air that she had enough time to ponder, If I were smart, which I plainly must not be, I’d use this knife to cut the laces of my bodice, as these cotton petticoats, when wet, will certainly drag me to the bottom of the bay.

  As though in one of those oddly immediate dreams when one tries to grab the matchbox to light the lamp and one’s ghostly hand sallies right through the solid object, she remotely observed that the broken tree branch floated down at a much swifter rate than her descent. How odd. Do I not weigh more than that branch? Releasing the useless knife, she reached out to touch the orchid, its petals the velvet of blancmange. Although she knew to touch it would mean its death, in an emotional pirouette worthy of Marie Taglioni, Dagny clutched the flower to her bosom, smearing her face in the delightful petals that hearkened her back to childhood gardens, before everything had gone frightfully wrong.

  She hit the water’s surface with an explosive bang and immediately sank at least fifty feet.

  She was right: the yardage of cotton embalming her dragged her to the very bottom of the lagoon. Lucky she’d left her hat back on the bluff with Izaro. An angelic grove of peachy coral coruscated in the celestial light beamed to Dagny’s depths by a sun that now seemed high overhead indeed.

  This is it, then. I am meant to die here, staring at this six-foot iron-colored Cretaceous fish that looks like an armored fossil sent straight from Ultima Thule, and…

  A trondro? Dagny touched the ugly, sedate fish lips with the orchid-crowned branch. Neither fish nor flower recoiled in fear, both undulating with contentment in the cozy womblike waters. Why, ichthyologists would be pleased to see you … you ugly, extinct Cretaceous fish!

  These were usually the happiest of times for Tomaj, the days immediately after careening his beloved Stormalong, when the most heinous heaving-down work was done, that awful yet irresistible job that brought men together in an other-worldly camaraderie. They were at their most haggard and frowzy, eager to spend their gun-money on the few pleasures the island had to offer—the few they didn’t already possess. Though they’d broken a mast in the Strait of Malacca, they’d replaced the jury-mast and were all an end now, embayed with their old flotilla in their glorious port of Mavasarona, and the joy was palpable as the men went about their making and mending. Men reefed the newly set sails, and the absence of a pennant told any potential raiders they were out of commission, though Tomaj reveled with glee knowing his bow-chasers were at standby, the match-tubs back in place.

  Tomaj assisted the joiner in chiseling some gingerbread work. He leaned against a water-butt, and as he would never want to muss his Marcella waistcoat, he tucked a kerchief into the cambric frill o
f his shirt, opened fashionably at the throat and dressed up with a lacy cravat. No matter what his workaday task in Mavasarona, Tomaj enjoyed the role of dasher.

  The crew had all been home to their wives, screwed their brains out, and now were laid up in ordinary moored at the anchorage. Hands lounged about on the windlass and forecastle deck, cut-splicing and crowning fag-ends of ropes. More sedate fellows made neat Flemish fakes, and palm-and-picket men sewed canvas while other young gents played a boisterous game of skittles, the balls bowling heavily across the deck. As they had no back-board, the balls had a tendency to disappear down the scuppers, so someone had ingeniously brought out a harness-casket—from Slushy the Bootblack Boy’s galley, presumably, to judge from the racket Slushy raised, scampering about with his spidery limbs flailing. The young sportsmen only teased, claiming the toughness of the meat inside the casket was because Slushy had forgotten to remove the harness of the horse he packed in it.

  The entire luminous tableau might have been a serene painting by Pocock. Zaleski, a crotchety Britisher with the most mellifluous tenor, took up belting “Round the Corner, Sally.”

  Round the corner is a long, long way,

  To Valipo and Caleo Bay

  Round the corner we must roam,

  We don’t care if we never go home.

  Other men joined in, and their coarse and lusty singing brought a smile to Tomaj’s mouth.

  The quartermaster Antoine Youx hove into sight, casually setting his tall, scrawny bum on the water butt. “Êtes vous tout droit, Capitaine?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “The foot of the fore topsail has been repaired,” Youx informed him. “Find anything out in Tamatave?”

  “I stopped in at the Port Admiral’s office. Remember that Soper fellow, the Lloyd’s of London agent? He was there. Told me an interesting tale. Another Lloyd’s agent in Smyrna had a pirate’s brain, picked in brine in ajar”—Youx gasped in horrified surprise—”and he intended to take it to Baltimore to be tested.”

  “Tested? For what?” Youx was a craggy, worn-out character who looked much older than his thirty and five years. The nautical life did that to one, if one was always like Youx, jumping aloft in the riggings and forever sliding down the shrouds and backstays, insisting on reefing and furling because allegedly every other experienced foretop-man was a grossly incompetent looby, even the men who’d been with them since New Orleans. Still, he was an honest, straightforward, bang-up cove, an extremely willing and able worker doing his best to honor his predecessor. Best of all, he’d selflessly chosen not one or four or five Malagasy wives, as most hands did, but, following Tomaj’s illustration, merely rotated women into his chambers based upon whim or the weather.