The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Read online

  Tomaj took the kerchief of wood shavings to the rail and dumped them overboard. He thought of the tea-wagon they’d just captured last month, chock-a-block with dates and rice. The men, irate at being unable to find the usual gold bars or bags of loose gems that Indiamen often carried, had flung overboard all the dates, most especially the hated rice. Rice! What use had any Mavasaroan for the ubiquitous pasty garbage? “I imagine they want to study it, maybe palpate different sections to discover what turns moral, upright citizens—you know, bankers and insurance men, such as we were—into deviate, blood-thirsty, pillaging despots.”

  Youx threw his head back and laughed heartily. With the myriad of smile lines radiating from his eyes, when he laughed he resembled a sun-dried plum—a handsomely Gallic one, to be sure. “Aye. Weren’t we all bankers at one time? I, myself, was a broker of fine stocks with the Barclay firm, and played chess with Louis de la Bourdonnais.”

  “Ah, his own automaton could beat Bourdonnais at chess.”

  A school of brilliant angelfish gathered to inspect the wood shavings, their dorsal fins frothing the water’s surface, spraying adamantine droplets and elbowing out the small lemony butterfly fish. I’m sick to death of rice, thought Tomaj. Perhaps tonight back at the house I’ll get Ramonja to concoct a nice dressed lobster with macaronis … The smoke of his kitchen emits incense worthy of the gods.

  “A pickled pirate’s brain?” The joiner Smit finally reacted to Tomaj’s news. “I never. Did he happen to say whose brain it was?”

  Eighty yards away in the lagoon there came a loud splash of something heaved from a great height. It was no ball, as there was no report, but the crew, being engaged in a skittish trade, ran like riggers to the rail. Tomaj dashed forward, dodging the gunners McInerny, Castillo, and Hegemsness as they flung down their marline spikes, shakings and oakum scattering.

  Over the lagoon, Tomaj saw only an indefinite cat’s paw where the skin of the water had been pierced. Grasping the boatswain Broadhecker by the sleeve, Tomaj demanded, “A fish, did you see?”

  “That’s the mightiest fish I’ve ever heard. A humpback, we’d see from here. I’m taking the longboat ashore to get the quarter-gunners.” As Stormalong carried twenty-eight guns, Tomaj felt it prudent to keep seven of the skilled, intelligent orphans aboard, tough boys picked up in various ports of the world. “Might I use your speaking trumpet? I’m sure they can hear me from their houses.”

  “It’s in the binnacle.”

  “Balásházy!”

  Tomaj turned to Zaleski. “Yes.”

  “I’m not shooting you a line, old man.” The venerable salt affected a false air of humility, holding his fusty old Turkish skullcap. “But that weren’t no shot, nor fish. Looked to me like a fancy lady.” A few men who backed Zaleski up in his absurd claim smiled widely, displaying an array of noisome, rotten teeth.

  Tomaj barked, “There’s quite a large difference between a giant fish and a fancy lady, Zaleski. What makes you say a fancy lady fell into the drink?”

  The gangly man gestured sincerely with the cap. “Because it were, Balásházy! Answer me this: What sort of ball is rigged out in a shade o’ orange satin what looks like the color of the Imam’s palace at sunset?”

  Tomaj glanced at the able seamen behind Zaleski. “Do you agree? Did you see a lady as well?”

  “Aye, sir, definitely a lady, soaring through the sky with frilly petticoats all aflutter.”

  “We was standing right there in the waist rattling down some shrouds when we sees this orange bloom whaling through the sky like a plumy heron.”

  Tomaj saw no more ripple over the lagoon. A Malagasy fellow stood at the foreshore, gesticulating wildly like a shorebird flapping his white lamba, wading three steps into the water only to race back to the beach as though a colossal hammerhead lurked in the coral shoals. Whisking the speaking trumpet from Broadhecker’s grip as he jogged past, Tomaj bellowed out in Malagasy, “You there! Did a lady just fall into the lagoon?”

  Of course, he couldn’t hear the fellow’s answer, the fellow not possessing his own speaking trumpet, so Tomaj ordered Broadhecker, “Call Firebrand!” Firebrand was their best swimmer, having spent time on one of those West Indies islands where most seamen lolled about all day sipping drinks from coconut shells.

  “Ashore in Harmony Row,” piped a hand.

  “I’ll be cursed.” Tomaj paced the deck, his hands shaped into claws. He pointed a sudden stiff forefinger at a cowering hand. “Frost! You’re always diving down for shellfish and mollusks!”

  “Sorry, Captain,” Frost said. “I can only get the clams that bite me around the calves and knees, sort of … like.”

  Pivoting on the heel of his boot, Tomaj made one last appeal to the quartermaster Youx. Youx could not swim at all, like many seamen who had been discouraged from learning for fear they’d swim to shore one fine day and never return.

  Tomaj roared, “Fuck me dry!” Peeling off and flinging his Newmarket coat as he leapt to the gunwale, Tomaj was not unconscious of the humorous manner in which the elegant garment with the braided border slapped the self-same Frost aft his pitiful head, where it adhered with the tenacity of an amorous gull. Yanking off his boots and throwing them into the gaping crowd, Tomaj bellowed, “Ensure you make yourselves scarce! I’ll not have a fancy lady gazing upon the likes of you when she returns from Davy Jones’s locker!”

  For she might be a high society Malagasy woman … or perhaps Peg, who’d been cracked ever since he banished her from his bedchamber, deciding to take a plunge into the pond.

  Tomaj made a stately dive off the bulwark, hewing the peel of the placid water.

  He’d almost forgotten how pleasant it was beneath Mavasarona Bay’s sultry surface. He was glad for the opportunity to exercise his muscles in serene surroundings. As he made a bee-line for where the “fancy lady” had drowned—she was after all probably only an aurora, the product of too many afyuni-addled brains—limbs powerfully scudding the tropical water, Tomaj was pleased to brush up against a school of the prettily colored clownfish. Their tickling fins gave credence to their joyous moniker, and Tomaj removed the Marcella waistcoat, leaving it to purl in his wake with the teeming chromatic fish. His black hair-ribbon fluttered away like a frightened moray eel.

  Ah, the wonders of equatorial waters.

  Springing both feet off stony coral that resembled a bowl of rusty flowers, Tomaj shot to the surface and gulped air. He was only two yards from where a few tiny bubbles still burbled.

  He plummeted down, down, down, his strapping legs working pleasurably.

  Tomaj stroked through diverse layers of warmth, some cooling his brow, others warming his chest as three rays swished by, their fluffy gray fins brushing against his arms like velvet. There, Tomaj saw the orange blob the men had mentioned, murky beneath olive spume emanating from a gathering of sea urchin.

  Yes, it was a lady. She slumbered, probably dead, on a spongy rock that resembled a crocodile fossil, her head making an indentation beside its glassy eye, an eye that flickered up and down in the silence, and looked askance at Tomaj.

  Enwrapping her around the waist in his long arm, he shoved off to the surface.

  She was clad in a gorgeous dress of gros de Naples. Why was a fine vazaha lady drowning in his lagoon? She wore enough petticoats to smother a Samoan, and her rigid fingers would not release a branch upon which oscillated an orchid. Her small face, her billowy lips parted and already draining of blood, lolled against his shoulder. It was obvious he had to save her, more so than the wanton, depraved loobies that usually needed saving. She was not Malagasy, nor was she Peg, so Tomaj concluded she was someone of even more importance.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE, INDESCRIBABLE HAT

  DAGNY SAW HEAVENLY, INEXPLICABLE THINGS IN HER dreams.

  As was the norm in those dreams, all the loving memories were instantly ripped from her conscious mind the moment someone tried to kill her.

  What was this pe
rson doing? He (she assumed it was a he owing to his strength) pressed on her belly until she made wild vomits onto the sand, his entire chest covering her back, his arms long and powerful, his body like a giant fish, wet and nauseating against her.

  Gushes of stinging saltwater spewed from her guts, and it was several long moments before she was able to gasp air and attempt to push the body off her. She was so weak she flopped like a formless invertebrate onto her face, and would not have been able to right herself had not the interloper rudely done it for her.

  He cradled her in the crook of his arm, keeping her head aloft so that, she supposed, she wouldn’t continue choking on the saltwater. “Mademoiselle,” he crooned in a far-away tone, as though he called from another island.

  She didn’t want to wake! She’d been fine where she was! She tried to recall. Who was it she’d been talking to … people so wise their intelligence was vast spheres above her own, and yet she’d been conversing with them, and holding discussions worthy of … well, of Sir Joseph Banks himself! She was already hard put to elicit a single sentence or concept of their lofty, penetrating discussion, nor what her long-lost friends had looked like, at all…

  “Mademoiselle,” sang the miscreant who had woken her.

  Angrily she forced her eyes open and saw that her pallid arm lay across the girdle of her sopping dress, festooned with sea algae and a shivering Echinothrix sea urchin, and she still gripped the orchid branch. “Angraecum sesquipedale!” she cried with wonder, all anger falling from her.

  “What in …” murmured the man in English, and Dagny was so startled to hear her native language she whipped her head to face him.

  And knew she was still dead.

  For here she beheld the most strangely wonderful man of her long, bitter, jaded life. He was an impossible man—she had seen them all. He was Arabic or Levite, deeply bronzed all over, with a beautifully hooked, aquiline nose so profoundly large in its splendor she shivered to her very core—and knew she wasn’t dead anymore, for did images of a man’s face between one’s breasts even flit across the minds of dead people?

  What gave his face a sensual power were his luminous irises of chromium green tourmaline that gradated to prismatic dioptase toward his pupils. Dagny had never seen this crystalline color in any of the rocks her brother had brought home, aside from perhaps a Hindostani emerald that Salvatore owned. Slashed by two eyebrows of the blackest Egyptian night, there was a limpid, begging sadness to his eyes all out of proportion to the fact that he had just saved her, and he had no reason to be sad at all.

  And his mouth …! The archly cherubic lips lifted at the outer corners into a wry appeal to join him in a bit of badness, and Dagny was entranced for life.

  She shuddered.

  Lightly hovering his hand above the trembling orchid, he said softly, “Nascentes morimur.” Without looking, he picked up the zebra-striped urchin by one of its banded spines and flung it twenty feet off, returning his hand to float over her lap.

  His hand was a marvel of tapering statuary, each finger poised just so, long elegant fingers ringed on the first and second knuckles with gold and silver symbols of the Orient. He withdrew the hand to smear his dripping hair back from his forehead, hair black as obsidian revealing a flawless, intelligent forehead. A metallic earring gleamed against the glossy crow’s feathers of his locks.

  “Ah …” Dagny tried to breathe normally. She felt Izaro fluttering around the fringes of her awareness, scaring up sandstorms with his wide bare feet. “I really don’t speak Latin.” Nor did she speak Arabic, and her Malagasy was at best in the first stages of learning.

  “Ah,” he echoed her with relief, and his throat was as fine as his countenance, full and strong, browned by the sun. “I don’t really, either. It just sounded as though you were speaking Latin at first.” He smiled wider now.

  Dagny wanted nothing more than for this man to lean down and kiss her. They were strangers, so he could not. “Oh, I am sorry.” She struggled to right herself. As much as she loathed tearing herself from the cradle of his arm, it was only proper to sit upright on the sand and smile cheerfully, extending the hand that didn’t grasp the orchid branch. “I’m Dagny Ravenhurst, lately of Pennsylvania.” He placed his elegantly erotic hand into hers, and didn’t let go. “I, ah, I was crawling out onto that tree limb to retrieve this specimen when I went head over heels into the water.”

  “Count Pellegrin Tomaj Balásházy.” He had a New York-inflected patois that also had the flavoring of French, Malagasy, and an unexpected tinge of Russian. “I’m the master of this harbor, owner of that fleet, a businessman.” He tossed his head to indicate a natural harbor with all manner of ships, perhaps twenty of them, the flagship of which was a triple-masted Boston clipper that seemed to float above the slack lagoon waters. “I would have come sooner, but you weren’t yet drowning.”

  His shirt, undone at the neck, revealed a satiny clavicle above a robust pectoral muscle that made her want to slide her hand down his torso, to tickle him, to tease him into crying out—

  “Mademoiselle!”

  A hat was thrust between them, white crepe ornamented with ribbon and trimmed with heads of corn and branches of the tulip tree in blossom. Izaro shoved the tulips in Dagny’s face.

  The count only chuckled, gently moved the enormous hat away from them, and stood. “These hats are known to scare horses and dogs on the street. Please come up to my house, I’ll have my housekeeper make sure you’re all right. I won’t rest until I know you’re much improved from your sleep upon that extinct fish.”

  Dagny gasped. “So you, too, recognized the walking pectoral fins of that Cretaceous fish!” Realizing she spoke to his kneecaps, she allowed him to assist her to stand. The ringed hand he clasped around hers was oddly missing the last two joints of the forefinger.

  He cocked his head at her. “I’ve seen groups of them from time to time, their snouts tilted downward as if they aimed to stand on their heads.”

  Wrenching her hand from his, Dagny darted eagerly toward the water, only to run into that infernal hat that had seemed, this forenoon, to be such a pretty piece of fluff. Whisking the hat from Izaro, she twirled, stunned to find the count standing nearly on her toes. “Then I was not dreaming things! Do you have any fishermen who could assist me in—”

  “Miss. You’ve just come back from the dead. Please. Come with me, and forget about that ugly primordial fish. You may bring your … white flower, since you seem so attached to it.”

  Men stood about the coralline beach, gaping at them. Some looked to be bearers, standing next to a native palanquin-chair. These filanzanas were of strong native manufacture, resembling a large armchair, and were carried by two pairs of men on poles over their shoulders. An agreeable form of transport, it was much preferable to walking. In her three months in the country, Dagny had seen precious few horses, although she was told there were many in Antananarivo, the capital in the cloudy highlands perched along the spine of the island.

  Dagny ascended the filanzana while Izaro, as a favored manservant, climbed in on the other side, looking down his broad nose at his fellow islanders who took no note of his attempted arrogance. A cunning white boy in a sort of naval costume, a poppet with a swab of yellow hair, handed her savior a handsome pair of Hessian boots. “You mean to have a bun-fight with the drownded lady from the drink?”

  Was it possible that the adorable boy had made that impudent query?

  “Dowse it, Bellingham. Didn’t you go into Tamatave to fetch the ironmonger? Well, then, away with you.” The count spoke pleasantly as he pulled on his boots.

  “Aye, sir,” chirped the poppet, saluting. “Broadhecker’s out fishing for your fancy waistcoat, says you owe him a Latour.”

  “Humbug.” Count Balásházy reached out mildly and plucked the urchin’s hair-ribbon as the boy departed. The sophisticated man went on up the hill, apparently preferring to foot it.

  Dagny was content to follow behind in the filanzana, for he was a
graceful sight to watch. Entwining the ribbon into his long, damp locks with the precision of a gallant, the exceedingly tall man was almost painfully thin, but it was as if his bones were dainty, because he was certainly possessed of stirring musculature, and the way he must have swam with her a dead weight in his arms—

  “Aiiieee!”

  Izaro leapt nearly into her lap. Clutching each other, they both almost jumped out of the filanzana when a monstrous fluffy brown bear clambered into the conveyance with them. It was a large and friendly dog, and the bearers paid the critter no mind as they sprinted athletically up the sandy trail, but Dagny had a damnable time getting her “man-servant” off her lap.

  “Mandehana! It’s a devil!” Izaro shrieked in an oddly feminine tone, wringing the corncobs of the leghorn hat Dagny clutched in her lap.

  “It’s a dog, you old woman! See? He smiles at us like a giant toy bear!”

  Indeed, it was a fleecy creature, whose golden agate eyes faced them down innocently, its tongue lolling from its smiling mouth, its square, cocked ears like fox-fur muffs and its paws like enormous snowshoes.

  Izaro breathed a bit more freely, clambering down from Dagny’s lap. He even attempted a few unconvincing chortles to display his bravery, but suddenly the dog commenced a roaring barking directly at Dagny, the entire fur of its spine standing up toward the heavens, and when it backed away from her, the poor bearers nearly collapsed under the sudden shift of ballast, and they trended toward a grove of traveler’s trees.