Chapter Twenty-Three

Holden

Holden saw Tyler lying motionless on the bed from the window on the landing before he carried the heavy cardboard box downstairs. He let himself out of the house and crossed the yard, hesitating outside Tyler’s door. He didn’t want to knock and disturb him. Nor did he want to leave the box outside his door, where dust and maybe even rain could get into his collection. Not that he was that bothered anymore about the collection, but Tyler would be. And maybe his enthusiasm would kick start Holden’s appreciation of the hobby of kings. Maybe he and Tyler could be a pair of stamp collecting geeks together. For some reason, he liked that idea more than he could say. And he was all too well aware of the power of a hobby to take you away from the weight of life. Balancing the box against his chest, he tried the door handle and found it open. He tiptoed inside. He’d leave the box and let himself out. It would be a nice surprise for Tyler when he came around from his rest.

He entered the bedroom and placed the box on the foot of the bed, on the opposite side to where Tyler was stretched out, one long muscular leg bare with a white sock on the foot, the other ending just below the knee in a smooth stump. Holden stopped. He examined the stump for long moments. Then he went around the bed to the window and sat down beside Tyler. He smoothed Tyler’s dark hair back from his forehead with a tender hand and all sorts of feelings rushing to fill his breast. This man was special. Broken and damaged, but special, and Holden wanted him in his life. He couldn’t fuck this up. He couldn’t hurt Tyler. He needed to step up and be the man Tyler needed.

Tyler stirred under his touch, thick lashes flickering before he woke, looking up groggily at Holden. The smile he gave melted Holden’s heart. If he hadn’t been sure, he was now. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ve left the box. Go back to sleep and look at them when you get the chance.”

Tyler raised himself on his elbows. “No way,” he said and Holden couldn’t help but smile at the childish excitement on his face. He got that. He’d had it once himself when looking through packets of stamps he’d purchased without seeing the contents first. There was always the chance of a great find, a rare find, no matter what the odds. Although it hadn’t really been about the money with him, more about the beauty of stamps, their history and the story they told.

“All right then,” he said and got up to walk around the edge of the bed. He opened the box and lifted out the contents—smaller boxes, envelopes, glassine packets of stamps, albums and stockbooks—before placing the box on the floor and spreading the goodies out over the other side of the bed. He couldn’t believe how much stuff he had. He didn’t remember most of it. He found numerous envelopes sorted by country or continent. He showed Tyler—Asia, Africa, US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and various countries in Europe that had their own envelopes like Germany and France. He remembered doing these over a period of years, recognized his own scrawl on the front as though looking at a stranger’s writing. Tyler opened one of the albums. Holden hoped he wasn’t a purist about hinging stamps because Holden had done that from childhood. Only when he got older and gained some stamps worth something did he display them in folders and stockbooks.

“Really nice,” Tyler said, admiring the colorful Hungarian stamps Holden had a lot of which he’d been given by a family friend in the late seventies and early eighties. He got a lot of pleasure from looking at those. He loved the birds, the butterflies and flowers and was even now more attracted to those than creased up old stamps from over a hundred years ago. Even though those were worth the big bucks. Still, he found himself apologizing to Tyler. “I never really collected to retire on the profits,” he said with an awkward laugh. “I like pretty stuff.”

Tyler had moved onto a few sheets of Japanese stuff on black plastic cards—all flora, fauna and Mount Fuji—some of Holden’s favorites. “I can see that,” he said with a reassuring smile that told Holden he didn’t think he was as worthless as his collection. If he was disappointed that Holden’s collection probably didn’t contain any gems, he didn’t show it. On the contrary, that childish excitement remained on his face as he searched through the collection.

Holden located a few A4 size wallets of stamps—there had to be thousands. “These are the last stuff I bought.”

Tyler grinned, looking thrilled, and Holden found two lots of tweezers in the box, handing one to Tyler before he tipped one of the folders onto the bed. They sorted in silence for long minutes, occasionally making murmurs of appreciation. The stamps were a world mix and while many were as modern as the 1980s, some were considerably older. As in a hundred years older. Tyler showed him a couple of Queen Victoria stamps from Malta and Jamaica and nodded approvingly and Holden smiled and thought about gifting the entire collection to Tyler just to make his day.

Tyler held up a red stamp in his tongs. “Penny red.”

“Really?” It really was.

“Have you got a magnifier?” Holden pulled one from the box and handed it over. Tyler put it to his eye. “Well, it’s not a plate 77.”

Holden didn’t know much at all about Victorian stamps and wished he did. “That’s the big bucks?”

“Yeah. Thousands. This looks like a plate 88. It’s mint with a nice clear watermark.”

Holden had never looked at plate numbers in his life and hadn’t really cared when he had been collecting his birds, butterflies and flowers. This stamp had four perfect regular borders with the initials M and K in the bottom corners and swapped around in the top corners. “Worth anything?”

Tyler pulled his phone from his pocket and thumbed the buttons, opening a browser. “Couple of hundred bucks,” he said.

Holden smiled. “Not bad at all. Maybe we’ll find more.”

They looked at each other. Tyler’s eyes were shining and Holden wanted to be the one to put that expression there for the rest of his life. He dipped his gaze back down to the pile of stamps and froze as something jumped out at him as though painted in neon.

“What the fuck?” he said softly.

“What?”

Holden reached into the pile with his tongs, his hand starting to shake with adrenaline because he recognized the stamp. He wasn’t sure what it was or from where, but he knew he had seen it before, and recently.

As the tips of his tweezers found it and lifted it free, Tyler let out a cry like someone might make when they won the lottery.

“No!” he yelled, “no!” And he grasped Holden’s wrist, making him hold the stamp between them, bending his head to look while with the other hand, he fumbled the magnifier to his eye.

Holden knew then where he had seen the stamp before. In Tyler’s kitchen on his phone that week when Tyler had said he would never own it. The red two penny with the flowers and the coats of arms. 1857. No postal cancellation. Thirteen thousand bucks.

He jerked his gaze to Tyler’s and saw his grey eyes were wide and round and filled with tears. “Is it?” Holden asked, the stupidest question in the history of questions because he could see the name, for fuck’s sake, Newfoundland, and the design and he knew it was.

He knew just like he knew their future was now way rosier than he had first thought. He cupped Tyler’s face and kissed him before he dug his tweezers back into the pile of stamps. “Maybe there’s more,” he said.

Tyler laughed. “Greedy much?”

“Hey, we found a Penny Red and a rare Newfoundland so far. What are the chances of something else?”

Tyler shifted a few stamps with his tweezers. “Did you really get these from eBay?”

Holden searched his memory. “Maybe not. Maybe it was at a garage sale in my old neighborhood.”

“They obviously didn’t know what they had.”

“No. That’s why we might find something else.”

Tyler gave a sharp intake of breath. His whole body started to quiver. “Like this?”

Holden saw the stamp he was holding up. An Inverted Jenny.