The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  "The leaves of his albums were masterpieces. The colors! And the way in which they ranged across the page, each one a dab from the palette of a Turner.

  "They began, of course, with the black issues of 1840. But soon the black warms to brown, the brown to red, the red to orange, the orange to bright carmine; on to indigo, and Venetian red—a bright blossoming of color, as if to paint the bursting into bloom of the Empire itself. There's glory for you!"

  I had never seen Father so alive. He was suddenly a schoolboy again, his face transformed, and shining like a polished apple.

  But those words about glory: Hadn't I heard them before? Weren't they the ones spoken to Alice by Humpty Dumpty?

  I sat quietly, trying to work out the connections his mind must be making.

  "For all that," he went on, "Mr. Twining was not in possession of the most valuable philatelic collection at Greyminster. That honor belonged to Dr. Kissing, whose collection, although not extensive, was choice—perhaps even priceless.

  "Dr. Kissing was not, as one might expect of the head of one of our great public schools, a man born either to wealth or to privilege. He was orphaned at birth and brought up by his grandfather, a bell-foundry worker in London's East End which, in those days, was better known for its crushing living conditions than for its charity, and for its crime rather than its educational opportunities.

  "When he was forty-eight, the grandfather lost his right arm in a ghastly accident involving molten metal. Now no longer able to work at his trade, there was nothing for it but take to the streets as a beggar; a predicament in which he remained sunk for nearly three years.

  "Five years earlier, in 1840, the London firm of Messrs. Perkins, Bacon and Petch had been appointed by the Lords of the Treasury as the sole printers of British postage stamps.

  "Business prospered. In the first twelve years alone of their appointment some two billion stamps were printed, most of which eventually found their way into the dustbins of the world. Even Charles Dickens referred to their prodigious output of Queens' heads.

  "Happily it was in the Fleet Street printing plant of this very firm that Dr. Kissing's grandfather found employment at last—as a sweeper. He taught himself to push a broom with one hand better than most men did with two, and because he was a firm believer in deference, punctuality, and reliability, he soon found himself one of the firm's most valued employees. Indeed, Dr. Kissing himself once told me that the senior partner, old Joshua Butters Bacon himself, always called his grandfather 'Ringer' out of respect to his former trade.

  "When Dr. Kissing was still a child, his grandfather often brought home stamps that had been rejected and discarded because of irregularities in printing. These 'pretty bits of paper,' as he called them, were often his only playthings. He would spend hours arranging and rearranging the colorful scraps by shade, by variation too subtle for the human eye unaided. His greatest gift, he said, was a magnifying glass, which his grandfather bargained away from a street-seller after pawning his own mother's wedding ring for a shilling.

  "Each day, on his way to and from the board school, the boy called upon as many shops and offices as he was able, offering to sweep their pavements clear of rubbish in exchange for the stamped envelopes from their wastepaper baskets.

  "In time, those pretty bits of paper became the nucleus of a collection which was to be the envy of Royalty, and even when he had risen to become headmaster of Greyminster, he still possessed the little magnifying glass his grandfather had given him.

  "'Simple pleasures are best,' he used to tell us.

  "The young Kissing built upon the tenacity with which life had favored him as a boy and went on from scholarship to scholarship, until there came the day when old 'Ringer' was on hand in tears to see his grandson graduate with a double first at Oxford.

  "Now, there is a belief among those who should know better, that the rarest of postage stamps are those freaks and mutilations that are inevitably produced as by-products of the printing process, but this is simply not so. No matter what sums such monstrosities might fetch if they are leaked upon the market, to the true collector they are never more than salvage.

  "No, the real scarcities are those stamps which have been put into official circulation, legitimately or otherwise, but in very limited numbers. Sometimes a few thousand stamps may be released before a problem is noticed; sometimes a few hundred, as is the case when a single sheet manages to effect its escape from the Treasury.

  "But in the entire history of the British Post Office, there has been one occasion—and one occasion only—when a single sheet of stamps was so dramatically different from its millions of fellows. This is how it came about.

  "In June of 1840, a crazy potboy named Edward Oxford had fired two pistols at nearly point-blank range at Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as they rode in an open carriage. Mercifully, both shots missed their target, and the Queen, who was then four months pregnant with her first child, was unharmed.

  "The attempted assassination was thought by some to be a Chartist plot, while others believed it to be a conspiracy of Orangemen who wished to set the Duke of Cumberland upon the throne of England. There was more truth in the latter than the government believed, or perhaps than they were prepared to admit. Although Oxford would pay for his crime by spending the next twenty-seven years of his life confined to Bedlam—where he seemed more sane than most of the inhabitants and many of the doctors—his handlers would remain at large, invisible in the metropolis. They had other hares to run.

  "In the autumn of 1840, an apprentice pressman named Jacob Tingle was employed at the firm of Perkins, Bacon and Petch. Because he was, above all else, a creature of ambition, young Jacob was soon progressing in his trade by leaps and bounds.

  "What his employers did not yet know was that Jacob Tingle was the pawn in a deadly serious game, a game to which only his shadowy masters were privy."

  If there was anything that surprised me about this tale, it was the way in which Father brought it to life. I could almost reach out and touch the gentlemen in their high starched collars and stovepipe hats; the ladies in their bustled skirts and bonnets. And as the characters in his tale came to life, so did Father.

  "Jacob Tingle's mission was a most secret one: He was, by whatever means were at hand, to print one sheet, and one sheet only, of Penny Black stamps, using a bright orange ink which had been provided for his mission. The vial had been handed to him, along with a retaining fee, in an alehouse adjoining St. Paul's Churchyard by a man with a broad-brimmed hat who had sat in the tavern's shadows and spoken in a stony whisper.

  "When he had secretly printed this bastard sheet, he was to conceal it in a ream of ordinary Penny Blacks which were awaiting dispatch to the post offices of England. With this accomplished, Jacob's work was done. Fate would see to the rest.

  "Sooner or later, somewhere in England, a sheet of orange stamps would surface, and their message would be plain enough to those with eyes to see. 'We are in your midst,' they would declare. 'We move amongst you freely and unseen.'

  "The unsuspecting Post Office would have no opportunity to recall the inflammatory stamps. And once they came to light, word of their existence would spread like wildfire. Not even Her Majesty's Government could keep it quiet. The result would be terror at the highest levels.

  "You see," Father went on, "although his message came too late, a secret agent had infiltrated the ranks of the conspirators and sent back word that discovery of the orange stamps was to serve as a signal to conspirators everywhere to begin a new wave of personal attacks upon the Royal Family.

  "It seemed the perfect scheme. Had it failed, the perpetrators would simply have bided their time and tried again another day. But there was no need to try again; the thing went off like clockwork.

  "The day after he met the stranger in St. Paul's Church yard, there was a spectacular, and suspicious, conflagration in an alley directly behind Perkins, Bacon and Petch. As the printers and clerical staff dashed outside for a b
etter view of the fire, Jacob coolly pulled the vial of orange ink from his pocket, inked the plate with a spare roller he had hidden behind a row of chemical bottles on a shelf, applied a damped sheet of watermarked paper, and printed the sheet. It was almost too easy.

  "Before the other workers returned to their posts, Jacob had already tucked the orange sheet among its black sisters, cleaned the plate, hidden the soiled rags, and was setting up for the next run of ordinary stamps when old Joshua Butters Bacon himself strolled by and congratulated the young man on his coolness in the face of danger. He would go far in his chosen trade, the old man told him.

  "And then Fate, as Fate so often does, threw a wrench into the works. What the plotters could not foresee was that the man in the broad-brimmed hat would, that very night, be struck down in the rain in Fleet Street by a runaway cart-horse, and that with his dying breath, he would revert to the faith into which he had been born and confess the plot—Jacob Tingle and all—to a rain-caped bobby whom he mistook for a cassocked Catholic priest.

  "But by that time, Jacob had done his dirty work, and the sheet of orange stamps was already flying, via the night mail, to some unknown corner of England. I hope you are not finding this too boring, Harriet?"

  Harriet? Had Father called me “Harriet”?

  It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called “Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.” But Harriet? Never! Was this a slip of the tongue, or did Father actually believe he was telling his tale to Harriet?

  I wanted to shake the stuffing out of him; I wanted to hug him; I wanted to die.

  I realized that the sound of my voice might break the spell, and I turned my head slowly from side to side as if it were in danger of falling off.

  Outside, the wind was tearing at the vines that fringed the window as the wild rain came pelting down.

  "The hue and cry was raised," Father went on at last, and I stopped holding my breath.

  "Telegraphs were sent to every postmaster in the realm. To whatever corner of England the orange stamps might make their way, they were to be placed at once under lock and key, and the Treasury notified, posthaste, of their whereabouts.

  "Because larger shipments of the Penny Blacks had been sent to the cities, it was thought that they would most likely make their appearance in London or Manchester; perhaps Sheffield or Bristol. As it turned out, in fact, it was none of these.

  "Tucked away in one of the farthest pockets of Cornwall is the village of St. Mary-in-the-Marsh. It is a place where nothing had ever happened, and nothing was ever expected to.

  "The postmaster there was one Melville Brown, an elderly gentleman who was already some years past the usual retirement age, and was trying, with little luck, to put away a bit of his small salary to ‘tide him over to the churchyard,’ as he told anyone who would listen.

  "As it happened—since St. Mary-in-the-Marsh was off the beaten track in more ways than one—Postmaster Brown did not receive the telegraphed directive from the Treasury, and so it was with complete surprise that, some days later, after he had unwrapped a small shipment of Penny Blacks and was counting them to see that the tally was correct, he found the missing stamps literally at his fingertips.

  "Of course he spotted the orange stamps at once. Someone had made a dreadful mistake! There had not been, as there normally should have been, an official 'Instructions to Postmasters' pamphlet announcing a new color for the penny stamp. No, this was something of vast import, even though he could not say what it was.

  "For a moment—but only a moment, mind you—he thought that this oddly colored sheet of stamps might be worth more than its face value. Less than half a year after their introduction, some people, most likely people up in London, he believed, who had nothing better to do with their time, had already begun collecting self-adhesive postage stamps, and putting them in little books. A stamp printed off-register or with inverted check numbers might even fetch a quid or two, and as for a whole sheet of them, why.

  "But Melville Brown was one of those human beings who seem to be as scarce as archangels: He was an honest man. Accordingly, he at once sent off a telegraph to the Treasury, and within the hour a ministerial courier was dispatched from Paddington to retrieve the stamps and convey them back to London.

  "The Government intended that the rogue sheet be destroyed at once, with all the official solemnity of a Pontifical Requiem Mass. Joshua Butters Bacon suggested rather that the stamps be placed in the printing house archive, or perhaps in the British Museum, where they could be studied by future generations.

  "Queen Victoria, however, who was, as the Americans say, more than a bit of a pack rat, had her own ideas: She asked to be given a single stamp as a memento of the day she was spared an assassin's bullet; the remainder were to be destroyed by the highest-ranking officer of the firm that had printed them.

  "And who could deny the Queen? By now, with British troops about to invade Beirut, the Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne (whose name had been once linked romantically with Her Majesty's), had other things on his mind. And there the matter was allowed to rest.

  "So it was that the world's only sheet of orange penny stamps was burned in a cruet on the desk of the managing director of Perkins, Bacon and Petch. But before he lit the match, Joshua Butters Bacon had, with surgical precision, snipped off two specimens—this was some years before perforations were introduced, you see: the stamp marked 'AA' from one corner, for Queen Victoria and, in great secrecy, another marked 'TL,' from the opposite corner, for himself.

  "These were the stamps which would one day be known to collectors as the Ulster Avengers, although for many years before they were given that name, their very existence was a state secret.

  "Years later, when Bacon's desk was moved after his death, an envelope which had somehow become lodged behind it fell to the floor. As you may have guessed, the sweeper who found it was Dr. Kissing's grandfather, Ringer. With old Bacon dead, he thought, what harm could there be in his taking home as a plaything for his three-year-old grandson the single bright-orange postage stamp which lay nestled within it?"

  I felt a flush rising to my cheek, and prayed desperately that Father was too distracted to notice. How, without making the situation even worse than it was, could I tell him that both of the Ulster Avengers, one marked “AA” and the other “TL,” were, at that very moment, stuffed carelessly into the bottom of my pocket?

  seventeen

  PART OF ME WAS POSITIVELY TWITCHING TO PULL out the blasted stamps and press them into his hand, but Inspector Hewitt had put me on my honor. I could not possibly put into Father's hands anything which might have been stolen; anything which might further incriminate him.

  Fortunately Father was oblivious. Even another sudden flash of lightning, followed by a sharp crack and a long roll of thunder, did not pull him back to the present.

  "The Ulster Avenger marked TL, of course," he went on, "became the cornerstone of Dr. Kissing's collection. It was a well-known fact that only two such stamps were in existence. The other one—the specimen marked AA—having passed upon the death of Queen Victoria to her son, Edward the Seventh, and upon his death, to his son, George the Fifth, in whose collection it remained until recently—was stolen in broad daylight from a stamp exhibition. It has not been recovered.”

  "Ha!" I thought. "What about the TL?" I said aloud.

  "TL, as we have seen, was tucked safely away in the safe of the headmaster's study at Greyminster. Dr. Kissing brought it out from time to time, 'in part to gloat,' he once told us, 'and in part to remember my humble beginnings in case I should ever show signs of rising above myself.'

  "The Ulster Avenger was seldom shown to others, though; perhaps only to a few of the most serious philatelists. It was said that the King himself had once offered to buy the stamp, an offer that was politely but firmly declined. When that failed, the King begged, through his
private secretary, special permission to view 'this marmalade phenomenon' as he called it: a request which was speedily granted and which ended with a secret after-dark visit to Greyminster by his late Royal Highness. One wonders, of course, whether he brought AA with him so that the two great stamps might be once more, if only for a few hours, reunited. That, perhaps, will forever remain one of the great mysteries of philately."

  I touched my pocket lightly, and my fingertips tingled at the slight rustle of paper.

  "Our old housemaster, Mr. Twining, clearly recalled the occasion, and remembered, most poignantly, how the lights in the headmaster's study burned long into that winter night.

  "Which brings me back, alas, to Horace Bonepenny."

  I could tell by the changed tone of his voice that Father had once more retreated into his personal past. A chill of excitement ran up my spine. I was about to get at the truth.

  "Bony had, by this time, become more than an accomplished conjurer. He was now a forward, pushy young man with a brazen manner, who generally got his own way by the simple expedient of shoving harder than the other fellow.

  "Besides the allowance he received from his father's solicitors, he was earning a good bit extra by performing in and around Greyminster, first at children's parties and then later, as his confidence grew, at smoking concerts and political dinners. By then he had taken on Bob Stanley as his sole confederate, and one heard tales of some of their more extravagant performances.

  "But outside of the classroom I seldom saw him in those days. Having risen above the abilities of the Magic Circle, he dropped out of it, and was heard to make disparaging remarks about those 'amateur noodles' who kept up their membership.

  "With its dwindling attendance, Mr. Twining finally announced that he was giving up the halls of illusion, as he called the Magic Circle, to concentrate more fully upon the Stamp Society.

  "I remember the night—it was in early autumn, the first meeting of the year—that Bony suddenly showed up, all teeth and laughter and false good-fellowship. I had not seen him since the end of the last term, and he now seemed to me somehow alien and too large for the room.