The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"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 better 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.