Threepenny Plum

The Threepenny Plum

Richard A. Coffey

Copyright © 2016 Richard A. Coffey

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

Prologue

1849

Twelfth month, twenty-ninth day, 1849

Port Phillip District

Melbourne, Australia

My dear David,

I pray that this letter finds you in good health and with less melancholy than we shared four years ago after Mother was taken and Father fell ill. I shall never forget our father’s misery on the morning that you departed for London. He suffered a great deal during the weeks that followed, David, and when he died I too left Mere to find my fortune.

After I had closed the house, I set out to look for you. I fell in with some older fellows who were making the journey east. The roads were filled with travelers, many of them young and alone. By and by we were reduced to a dozen boys—all hungry lads and fast becoming adversaries, fighting for food and water. One night we were set upon by some cartmen while we were sleeping in a cowshed. I managed to escape the fracas (I didn’t stay to see what happened to the others); I’m ashamed to admit that I ran through the night following the roads by moonlight and then, and for many nights thereafter, I slept by day in freshly cut fields. I found comfort in a sheaf of rye, and I surmised that I was in far better circumstance traveling alone at night than by joining the disorderly daylight march into London under a blazing sun.

There were many travelers—perhaps fifty of us, David—on the road into London, some old, worn, and desperate for work and food and clean water. I saw many young as well, lying about in the ditches and in the fields, some ill and beyond comprehending their situation.

In London I survived in a tool shack on the embankment for a fortnight before I was found out by the coppers, who detained me for a theft that was not my doing. I was afterward brought before a justice who sent me down to the hulks like a common criminal. Fortunately, I found a friend, an older lad who had much experience among convicts; he saw to it that I came away from scrapes without serious injury. He showed me how to find some comfort in iron shackles—a restraint that has crushed the spirit of more men and boys than the murderous keepers themselves. My friend was several years older than I, nearly sixteen, I think, and quick on his feet and large enough to hold his own against a full-grown man—which he did on my behalf more than once. We’d only been on the River Thames a month before we were moved to the south of England, and from there to the Isle of Wight, where we became guests of Her Majesty’s Prison Service at Parkhurst. I must say that I lost my resolve at the sight of Parkhurst, for it seemed that I had come to the end of my useful life before I had lived but a dozen years. We were animals in that place—and treated as such. Every morning some of us were selected to suffer beatings so as to impress the recent arrivals; I know of two boys that perished on my block alone, one by his own hand and a length of rope.

Then a miracle: I found myself qualified for a ticket-of-leave—a chance to apprentice in Australia. The colonies, you may know, were beginning to turn away shiploads of England’s ruffians in penal service—ships with cargos of cunning convicts were being refused harbor at many ports. I’ve been told that as consequence the Home Office began to transport young boys to the colonies; a less expensive payload, and one salted with youth who were more interested in the opportunity of starting a new life than pursuing criminal occupation. For my part, I was satisfied to have sailed beyond the reach of the law in London. Many boys that I traveled with will settle abroad once they have served their time in an apprenticeship. There is a new, spirited youth in Australia Felix, which has no desire to return to England. All of this must please the Home Office, of course, for by transporting indolent children to the colonies there is now more room for debtors, the ill, and the homeless in the English prisons—and the streets are made safe from juvenile shenanigans.

I was soon bound for the Port Phillip District in Australia on the Majestic, a fit bark with a splendid captain and ship’s doctor—both of whom have made me their concern. I would this night be sleeping with sheep or in the rags of a boilermaker’s bunk if it were not for these fine men. It is in Captain Lambe’s care that I am sending this letter from Melbourne.

After a voyage of five months, and with the captain’s generous aid, I have begun a printer’s apprenticeship with the Melbourne engraver Thomas Ham. I am engaged to learn the lithography trade. If you look closely at the postage label on this letter sheet, my brother, you will see a threepenny half-length engraving of Her Majesty. This is Mr. Ham’s art, his design for the first postage of Victoria, but the stamp itself is my color work, one of a sheet of thirty that I pulled on the press alone just two nights ago.

I am the happiest that I have been since our childhood in Mere, David, and I pray this letter finds you in good health and spirit. I dream of the day that you make your way to Melbourne, where perchance we can adventure in this land together. There is talk here of gold for the picking, and there is work inland and the on the water. I hope you will join me in my good fortune. You will find me at Thomas Ham, Printer, Collins Street, East Melbourne.

Your brother, with love and respect,

Edward

Chapter 1

1975

It was finally over. I graduated. My roommates were on their way home or heading to Europe for a terminal summer fling. I was broke and alone in the old dorm, where I ate popcorn and mailed resumes. One day the Record-Gazette called and my spirits soared. I tossed my stuff in the Volkswagen and wheeled out of the university parking lot—on the road to the rest of my life. And that’s how this story begins.

I was bound for the Great Plains, where I was to start my first newspaper job, and I’d only been off campus for an hour or so before I began to feel apprehensive. Four years of college hadn't prepared me for the loneliness of such a journey. As it turned out, I wasn’t equipped to deal with the unforeseen either—but that was later—and anyway, who could have possibly guessed what would finally happen in that dusty corner of the Chihuahuan Desert?

What did happen would have seemed impossible to me that day, while I rolled along soothing my rootlessness with childhood memories of the soft summer years when I lay elbow-deep in living room carpet, absorbing images of the American West on Saturday morning television. I recalled the images of strong, rugged men, supple, spirited women, obedient children—pioneers all, driving splendid oxen across the endless plains, manifesting their destinies under deep blue skies amongst the lowing cattle, singing vaqueros and Pawnee Indians prowling the Flint Hills of Kansas… Thus I drifted across the infinite rolling prairies, nervous, but besotted with memorable impressions—I could actually hear prairie schooner canvas flapping when suddenly my van swerved to the shoulder.

The right-rear Firestone had exhausted itself on I-70, leaving a trail of mangled rubber and a long, oblique, black scar on the Kansas Turnpike. It was nearly an hour before I rejoined the turbulent stream of diesel freighters flowing toward Denver through the endless plains, an increasingly indifferent landscape of exhausted dirt and forgotten farms, rusted pickup trucks parked helter-skelter around rough-land beer halls, aluminum-sided apartments surrounded by unrealized dreams—a partial swing set, patches of abandoned asphalt, shuttered gas stations, destitute teepee motels. I was ten hours off campus, and my notebook was crammed with despair. My hands and my face were grease-smudged, my trouser knees ripped—the exposed flesh now tar-spotted and gritty—my shirt was wet, my socks were missing, and my naiveté was exposed and raw.

At the heart of it all, I was beginning to have second thoughts about accepting the first offer of employment, which had come by telephone ten hours earlier:

Yeah?

You the one looking for a reporter job?

Yes, sir! I sent an application last—

How soon can you be in Boulder, Colorado?

Uh, tomorrow, I suppose.

Be here before close of business. Ask for Darrell.

I jumped at the opportunity, of course, and gushing with confidence I said my goodbyes and loaded the van in three hours. I had calculated that I could make Boulder in less than a day, no sweat—even if I slogged along at 50.7 miles per hour, it’d be a snap.

On the plus side, I was twenty years old. I needed neither food nor sleep, and at the time I had acquired only trace amounts of common sense, so I was spared prudence—until once again the VW failed, this time coughing up a valve at Goodland, Kansas. I telephoned Darrell at Boulder.

He was on deadline, but said if I hailed the next westbound Greyhound, caught the shuttle from Denver to Boulder, and presented myself before sunset, I had a pretty good chance of keeping my job. If I missed the bus, he said, Then I’m afraid you missed the bus, son.

Eventually, I stood before Darrell, asleep on my feet, smelling of bus, broke, stained, smudged, and sick with hunger. I had left my aquarium, a breeding pair of cichlids, my bedding, my suitcase, all my clothes, a shaver, and a folder with my resume and personal particulars in the VW, which was parked in an alley behind Luke’s Lube in Goodland. My shoes, which I had secreted under the Greyhound seat while I napped, were headed for Fort Collins, but I still had my Olivetti portable in hand and my trusty Leica IIIF hanging around my neck.

Darrell peered over the edge of his desk. Christ, you’re a mess, he said.

He kindly advanced me funds for shoes, socks, shave, and a shower, and told me to check in with the night editor, Doc, when I was presentable.

It was just after midnight when I signed for a Record-Gazette Chevy Nova and headed west on my first assignment. I was told to drive to the junction of I-70 and the Colorado River, find somewhere cheap to sleep, wake before noon, and locate a retired adventurer called Phillip James, who was reported to be down from the high country, terminally ill, and likely to take a terrific story to the grave if I didn’t score an interview.

What’s the story? I asked Doc.

If I knew the answer to that question, you wouldn’t be standing here twirling car keys, would you? He tapped his head. Be on the job by noon, son. If you sleep past noon, just drop the keys in the mail and don’t come back.

I cruised west into the wee hours of a cold Colorado morning under a bright moon, and after two hours of nodding off in the Nova, I found lodging, a bed, and three sweet hours of sleep. At breakfast, in a corroded roadside diner, I queried after Phillip James.

Everyone had heard of him.

No one knew where he lived—or if he lived at all.

Try the Mattel Flats, an off-duty deputy offered.

The Flats, as the attendant called the Beaux Arts monstrosity, was a restored mansion made of glaciated boulders, erected in 1920 by gold miner Herbert Mattel at the foot of a large, rocky hill as an homage to his good fortune. But it was a debt-ridden, spider-infested bequest when I saw it, populated by a dozen creaky old men and half that many quiescent women. Phillip James, it turned out, was not among them, but was known to several of the residents, one of whom could speak but was hopelessly short of memory and narcoleptic. During one prolonged snooze, the attendant took me aside and suggested that I try the Four Peaks Motel, which was sinking in its own decay a few thousand feet beyond the shoulder of a side road five miles east of the Flats, on a pinkish plateau of sand and rock. Three of the twenty rooms at the Four Peaks looked inhabitable, and at least one was inhabited, I judged, by the presence of two wizened old men languishing on lounges in the sun.

Five hundred feet beyond the apartments, atop a rocky hillock, I found the name Phillip James scrawled on the arm of a huge wooden cross rising in Tower of Pisa fashion from the sand.

I focused my Leica on the weathered marker and made two exposures before I nearly stepped on a human frailty that had wandered into my shadow and was observing my work.

He was a gaunt thing, wrapped in a sheet—a caricature of a sorcerer with an animal-like hank of turbulent white hair. The being turned out to have a resonant voice and sharp blue eyes that danced over my countenance like midges on a summer’s night.

You know this man? he shook a crooked finger at the cross.

No, I don’t. I was looking for him though; obviously, I’m too late.

I am sunbathing just now—yonder, he said, pointing to a vast pit in the sand thereabouts. Called a buffalo wallow when it occurs on the Plains; no idea what it’s called up here.

He considered the wallow for a full minute, while much of his hair toppled over his eyes.

What do you wish to see me about? he said at last, flipping his snowy mane to one side with his long fingers.

You aren’t… Phillip James, are you? I said.

Yes, I am.

I looked at the cross. I thought—

He waved his hand. Just trying out some designs. This one seems a little ostentatious. What do you think?

I squinted at the hideous cross. Umm… goes with the neighborhood, I guess. Looks affordable.

Money isn’t the problem, sonny, proximity to habitation is—I cannot abide neighbors. Graveyards give me the creeps. Cremation would be the ticket if I could be sure of a romantic dispersal—alas, there’s no one to scatter my remains. Death is a do-it-yourself project, I’m afraid.

Are you really Phillip James?

And who might you be?

My name is Alex Woollcott. Apparently of no relation to Alexander Woollcott of Algonquin Round Table fame, or anyone of literary merit for that matter, though my mother wrote poems and published several in Grit when I was a child. I grew up in Virginia; my father flew the Douglas Skyraider in Korea, and we lived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge until he died of a brain aneurism at forty-two. My mother and I moved around Virginia a few times—she was a terrific mom, but a restless woman—until she finally succumbed to the charms of an airline pilot in Maryland. Nevertheless, I eventually graduated from Culpeper High School, a middling student with a fuzzy yearning to become a newspaperman—a yearning that I had focused to a burning passion at the University of Illinois.

However, I’d lost some fervor after spending the day with Phillip James. The sun was setting and my notebook was nearly empty. I called Doc at the Record-Gazette.

Who?

Alex Woollcott, Doc… the reporter you sent to the Colorado River Junction?

…

You assigned me to write about Phillip James, the adventurer?

…

Doc, I’m the one who has the Nova.

Oh, yeah. Where the hell are you? We’re about this close to reporting it stolen.

You wanted a story about Mr. James.

So, where is it?

It’s a big story, Doc. I’ll be here one more day.

Hell, you will. Bring the Nova back—tonight!

Phillip James sat on the bed in his ramshackle motel room under a naked light bulb that swayed on a frayed cord in a breath of night air, casting hideous shadows that danced above his flaccid headpiece. Still wrapped in a sheet, James looked like a tenured mental patient, nodding and smiling, exaggerating conventional facial expressions willy-nilly, while I explained why I had to leave him, and the high country, and return to Boulder—where, it occurred to me, I didn’t have a place to stay the night. I imagined sleeping in the Nova in the newspaper parking lot, if I was still employed, or perhaps on a Greyhound, eastbound, if I was not.

Then James surprised me.

"I’ve got a place in Denver. We could go there if you’d like. Consider this: I’ll ride with you to Boulder in the company’s Nova and let you read my tale. If you think it worthwhile, and if I detect sufficient passion in your reception to the story, we’ll spill the beans to your supervisor. If he fires you, we’ll write a tease for the Denver Post and give them copy by dawn. If the—what’s the paper?"

"The Record-Gazette."

Yes, if they like the story you propose, we’ll head down to Denver and get it done.

Why would you do that for me? I asked.

I would not be doing it for you, Mr. Woollcott. I am a selfish man. I detect in your footloose nature some ability as a scribe, so I am merely recruiting you to finish writing a story that I haven’t been able to finish myself for a half-century—and now before the damn thing has been committed to paper they tell me I’m about to expire. It’s a story that needs to see the light of day—and an adventure, by the way, that will titillate the dullest of readers. There’s a yarn in these hills, my boy—well, not just here, I’m sorry to say, and I have been looking. Somewhere in this lovely mountain range lies the final chapter of my life’s work.

James pulled three large scrapbooks from beneath his cot. He selected one and pushed it across the floor to me. This is the beginning of that story. You read and I will shower and dress. Read the introductory pages. When we fire up the Nova I’ll tell you more. By the time we reach Boulder, you’ll know what we have—and I’ll know if you have sufficient sensibility to imagine such a project as I have in mind.

I opened the scrapbook and read the yellowed typescript of a story that had been typed and severely edited with a blunt, soft-lead pencil—it was hard to read but it mostly went like this:

The Threepenny Plum

1849

An unusual postage stamp came into the world’s notice at daybreak on Sunday, December 30, 1849. It was on that morning that a printer’s apprentice in the Australian frontier town of Melbourne delivered a folded letter into the hands of William Lambe, master of the sailing ship Majestic. The letter was addressed to the apprentice’s brother in London, and affixed to it was the plum-colored variety of a threepenny postage stamp that was to be printed for the new colony of Victoria.

Postage stamps were just coming into use by the mid-nineteenth century, and many of the early examples, particularly those designed in primitive print shops, are valuable today—worth millions of dollars in a handful of cases. Few of these postage stamps have become as famous as the Threepenny Plum—a stamp-collecting legend.

While the stamp itself circulated among the albums of the wealthiest men in Europe and America, legend has held that the Plum had narrowly survived the flames of a dozen wars, the rot of dank holds in sailing vessels and the crush of desert heat. Folklore heralds the stamp’s miraculous survival, the cruel neglect of ignorant collectors, and the contemptuous disregard of investors.

The Threepenny Plum has disappeared from public view for many years at a time, though it has resurfaced at prestigious auctions. Collectors believed that the Plum was lost during World War II; in fact, it was not seen again until January 10, 1952, when the stamp lay between two men on the open page of a book in King Farouk’s study at Koubbeh Palace outside Cairo, Egypt.

A young American philatelist, Phillip James, sat across the table from the corpulent king. James leaned back in the plush velvet chair and sighed. He spun the stem of a magnifying glass in his long fingers. He mumbled to himself and bent over the stamp again. After a time, he looked up and rested his eyes briefly on the features of the azure-blue entablature that encircled the room. Majesty, he said at last, there is no doubt in my mind. This stamp is the authentic Threepenny Plum. My congratulations. May I ask—

The king raised his hand and shook his head. He looked worn beyond his thirty-two years. He fixed bloodshot eyes on the American and smiled. In due time, professor James. You have given me the best news that I have had in many weeks. When I am able to tell how I came to acquire the Plum, you will be the first to hear the story.

The stamp has been appraised on one occasion since, though it’s been bought and sold many times. Seven collectors are believed to have died trying to possess the Plum and many more have disappeared into the folds of history.

Such legends are shared by stamp collectors: colored bits of gummed paper ride envelopes through history, stirring passions, fetching thousands of dollars for their beauty and millions for their singularity. The best of their kind become icons of philately; their provenance alone is priceless historical footnote.

Like diamonds, postage stamps come into notice because a unique feature of their appearance enhances their charm; a stamp may be printed in error with incorrect inscriptions or a deviant color; a stamp may be printed with an inverted frame or missing numerals. Remarkable postmarks and intriguing scribbles on an envelope may command princely sums at auction—as may a stamp printed in a haunting hue. Whatever the distinction, a stamp enriched by the story of its creation is a gem in the eyes of men.

Stamps become valuable when men become obsessed by them. A stamp that passes unnoticed before the eyes of a postal clerk may attract the attention of a shopkeeper or a ship’s captain or a lawyer in Marseilles. Boys have discovered stamps that kings later covet. Men have fought to the death over stamps; they have lost their women and their fortunes and their countries for the sake of a stamp. And, although the rarest stamps in the world are owned by the richest men, all stamp collectors, the boys and the shopkeepers and the captains and the lawyers and the kings, open their stamp books of an evening and prize the scraps within.

This is the story of an unusual stamp—and the unusual men that the stamp has defamed.

The Threepenny Plum was born, innocently enough, on Collins Street in Melbourne, Australia, at Tom Ham’s print shop, where just after midnight on a hot summer’s night in 1849 a twelve-year-old boy, a printer’s apprentice called Edward Wilson, smeared a daub of brilliant crimson color into a small jellied glob of slate blue ink and produced a plum hue—the brilliance of it hidden momentarily by a sharp shadow cast by a hanging gas lantern. The boy touched the wet ink with his finger and smeared the result on the corner of a smooth paper sheet.

He stepped into the light and smiled.

*****

When I looked up from the scrapbook, I was surprised to see, towering above me, preening before a mirror, Phillip James, transformed. The galaxy of disheveled hair that had moved around on his head like a pet marmot had been soundly tamed; imprisoned is not too strong a word for the handsome coiffure that he had somehow contained in a single glorious wave that began at his forehead, crested a moment later, and fell sublimely over the back of his head in a silver crescendo. His desert-worn face had become rich and intelligent and made of ideal parts. His teeth, which I had not noticed previously, were perfectly arranged and complemented his brilliant blue eyes. He was dressed in expensive khaki—Brooks Brothers or better—and he smiled down on me like a saint.

I had been sitting cross-legged on the floor reading the scrapbook and filling my notebook, and when I looked up at James, agape, I found no words worthy of his presence.

What did you think of that piece of writing? James asked.

It has style, it seems well written, and it’s interesting. Did you write it? Are you the Professor Phillip James who sat in the palace with King Farouk?

The man laughed. No, that is not my writing, and yes, it was I that sat with Farouk. But you must understand, Alex, that it would not please me to think that you were easily distracted by such trifling incidentals. The real story is the existence of a postage stamp that has teased millions of dollars into circulation from the bank accounts of wealthy men all over the world. This is a story about a postage stamp—about so big by so big—that came into being during the last days of 1849 and has become famous. I would like to convince you to chase that stamp with me and write about our adventure. I ask no more.

I was going to say something as I stood, but James just smiled at me and said, Hush, let’s gather our things and be on the road. First, you need a shower, then I will drive the Nova—I am qualified in that vehicle; I have borrowed a few of its kind from the Hertz corrals. I will deliver a steady ride so that you may read the laconic verse of my previous scribe, who had the right idea, but strained a rather small brain, I’m afraid.

What happened to him? I asked.

He disappeared in Peru—I had warned him about Peru, but he persisted. At any rate, the fellow wrote the story that you are about to read and spent several years with me researching the origins of the Threepenny Plum. Together we explored the physical world through which this stamp had passed—Australia, Africa, England and Europe, Asia, and damn near every island in the Indian Ocean. We found traces of the Plum everywhere. But more importantly, we began to get a picture of the stamp’s creator and a taste of his ambition to produce such a lovely thing. It’s a story of art, Alex, and desire, and yes, greed. It’s the story of man, isn’t it?

I was probably expressionless at that point, as I wasn’t listening carefully—I have that weakness. I was worrying about my assignment, thinking about this odd man.

James, meanwhile, continued. "We are that unique animal that has culture, Alex. We make things that not only keep us alive but give us pleasure, and this is a story about how that happens. Tonight, you will meet the stamp’s creator on the pages of this scrapbook—though I think the boy would be the last to admit such fame—and it begins many months before the stamp