The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (42 page)

T
he story
you have just read is, of course, fiction. And yet it was inspired by fact: by the true story of the rarest stamp in the world, the British Guiana One Cent Magenta, sometimes described as the Mona Lisa of philately.

For collectors, the value of the One Cent Magenta lies in both its uniqueness and its history. After a shipment of stamps from the UK failed to arrive in British Guiana, a new batch of stamps was printed locally. But the quality was poor, and so the Postmaster General of British Guiana ordered that each stamp be hand-signed in order to prevent forgeries. Of the one cent stamps printed, only one survives, bearing the initials of postal clerk Edmund Dalziel Wight. This is the One Cent Magenta. But that’s not all.

Just like in
The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q
, the One Cent Magenta has quite a bit of personal family history attached to it. Edmund Dalziel Wight happens to be an ancestor of mine, my mother’s great-grandfather. Often she told me the story of the stamp’s genesis, pointed out to me the post office where E.D.Wight used to work. “The stamp is now worth a small fortune,” she’d say, and there we have it: the spark of a story.

As I grew older, the tale of the innocent signing of a stamp that would go on to earn a fortune fuelled my imagination. 
What if
 another one of those stamps survived within the family, I asked myself;
what if
it turned up in one of those drawers of junk I used to burrow through as a child?

Those ‘what ifs’ never left me and, after the publication of my first three novels, it became the inspiration for a novel in which just such a stamp turns up – a family heirloom worth millions. 
The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q
 is the result.

O
f Marriageable Age