‘Don’t be so impatient. I haven’t finished yet.’ He smiled. ‘But it’s interesting — very. I’ll tell you why in a minute.’ And he leaned forward again and began working his way through the second volume. It was so quiet on board I could hear the ticking of the ship’s clock and the gurgle of the tide making against the bows. And then, when he came to the proofs, he held the two loose leaves up to catch the light, peering at them closely. ‘Do you use a magnifying glass when you’re charting?’
‘Yes, do you want it?’
‘Please.’
I found it for him, and he went over those last two pages again, examining the proofs through the glass. ‘Know anything about the person who put this little collection together?’ He seemed quite excited.
‘A little,’ I said. ‘But I’d rather hear what you think first.’
He hesitated, the corners of those bright blue eyes crinkling. ‘Want me to stick my neck out, do you? All right, but tell me something first. This client of yours who’s had such a poor time of it, does she want to sell, or don’t you know yet?’
‘I think that would depend on the price,’ I said cautiously.
He laughed. ‘I never doubted you were a good agent, Roy, but don’t get too excited. We’re not dealing with the earlies here, no Mauritius or other rarities, except for the “Lady McLeod”. Put it this way, is she after a quick cash sale, or is she going to send them to auction? You can tell me that, surely.’ And he added, ‘At auction, as you very well know, it could take four months, even longer, before she got her money.’
‘Are you interested in them personally, then?’ I hadn’t expected that.
He hesitated, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, I think I might be. Not because of the value of the stamps, but because of the collection as a collection. It has a distinct curiosity value.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’ve looked through it. Didn’t anything strike you?’
I nodded. ‘New Zealand and those Australian states, you’d expect a man living somewhere in the South Pacific to collect them. But there are Canadian provincials as well, a lot of Newfoundland. And most of them unused, so it looks as though he visited the eastern seaboard of Canada, maybe traded there.’
‘It’s possible.’ But he sounded doubtful. ‘My guess is he simply wrote for them so that he could see what they were like.’ He picked up the last two pages and turned them round so that I could see them. ‘Know what these are?’
‘Proofs,’ I said. ‘But it did occur to me they might be fakes.’
‘Look again.’ And he pushed one of the pages towards me.
I bent forward, examining once again the two little rectangles of thick yellowish paper, one showing the frame of the stamp, the other simply the unadorned shape of what looked like an Arctic or North Atlantic seal. On the other page there was just the one rectangle of paper showing the seal inside the frame. ‘Doesn’t anything strike you now?’
I shook my head. There was no value given, no indication of country, the frame surround all black.
He turned the pages round, lost in thought as he stared down at them. ‘I’m not quite sure if they’re die or plate proofs. That’s why I wanted the magnifying glass. The whole process, as you know, starts with the die, and it is from this original picture, engraved on the flat, that the roller impression is taken by rocking it back and forth over the die under pressure. This transfer, or roller die, is then used to transfer the impression, again by rocking back and forth, on to the actual plate from which the final stamp will be printed. Now, I think these are die proofs. That’s to say, they’re taken from the original flat engraving; in the case of the one showing the seal inside the frame, both dies have been used on the same sheet of paper, the proofs being struck off singly. They have that extra sharpness. If they were plate proofs, they would have been taken from the plate itself after it had been hardened for printing the full sheet of stamps.’ He leafed back through the album, pausing several times. Finally he turned again to the pages with the proofs. ‘Very interesting,’ he mused. ‘The collection itself, I mean. As you say, no Queen’s heads. The stamps are all of ships and views, with a sprinkling of animals. Recess or line-engraved printing, mostly Perkins Bacon, the first printers of postal labels and specialists in line-engraving for banknotes.’
He leaned back, and I guessed I was in for one of his lectures. He loved giving tongue on the printing of stamps, and though he could be very interesting on the subject, he always talked as though the other person knew nothing at all about it. ‘Perkins Bacon now. They produced the Penny Blacks of 1840, all our early stamps, the Penny Reds and Twopenny Blues. Then De La Rue took over, printing by the letterpress process — surface printing. Not nearly as attractive, and the colours harder. So anybody collecting stamps in the ordinary way at the turn of the century would almost certainly have included some of the early line-engraved GBs.’ He picked up his glass, which was empty, and held it out to me. ‘While you’re pouring another drink, you might fill me in on the background, or didn’t you ask her?’
‘About the man who made the collection?’
He nodded. ‘Carlos Holland. Was that his name? It’s on the flyleaf of each album.’
‘Why do you want to know about him?’ I asked. ‘It can’t make any difference to the value of the stamps surely.’
‘I’m curious, that’s all. This isn’t an ordinary collection. I think he put it together because he was exploring design possibilities before ordering stamps he required for his own official use. He was probably a colonial governor, somebody like that.’
‘And the die proofs at the end represent the design of his choice, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes, that’s about it.’
‘Well, I can tell you this, he wasn’t a colonial governor.’ I reached for the gin bottle and the Angostura. ‘But you’re right about the name.’ And I passed on to him what little I had been told about Carlos Holland.
‘So the ship was a total loss. It went down with all hands.’
‘That’s what I understand.’
‘Then he couldn’t have had this collection with him at the time. If he had, it would be at the bottom of the sea. So how did it come into Miss Holland’s possession?’
‘As I understand it, the albums were among her brother’s things when he was invalided home.’
‘How did he come by them?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Didn’t you ask her?’
‘No.’
‘Very odd,’ he murmured, shaking his head. ‘This man Carlos Holland leaves a collection of carvings with his brother, but not the stamps. And then, somewhere on his way out to the Pacific, at some port of call, he suddenly decides to leave these albums ashore. And there’s something else,’ he said, gazing abstractedly at the albums. ‘What about the sheets?’
‘Sheets?’
‘Yes, the sheets,’ he said almost irritably. ‘The printed sheets of the final stamp.’ He looked up at me over his tumbler. ‘You say he owned some schooners and came back to England to add a steamship to his fleet. That suggests he required stamps for the franking of mail carried in his vessels. So where are the sheets?’
‘Presumably at the bottom of the sea.’
He nodded, but I could see he was not wholly convinced. ‘Very odd,’ he said again. ‘And the design … I can only recall having seen two ship stamps, and like the “Lady McLeod” stamp, they both carried the picture of the ship. This stamp doesn’t; the picture enclosed in the frame is of a seal. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’
The collection includes quite a few stamps with ships on them.’
‘Exactly. And he chooses a seal as his emblem. Seals don’t swim around coral reefs in the warm waters of the South Pacific. Not the grey or Atlantic seal, which I think this is.’ He gave a little sigh. ‘Pity the girl isn’t here to answer a few questions.’
‘I don’t think she’d be able to help you. She didn’t seem to know very much about the stamps. All she said was that they were among Timothy Holland’s things when he arrived back in England and that another brother, Jona Holland, wrote that he’d been very excited by the find.’