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The Case of the Nun's Ruby 99
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the Amsterdam dealer who lost. He'd taken the gem from an exiled Russian Grand Duchess who hadn't any money to pay him back."
Jacob
nodded his head up and down several times, but went away unmoved. When
I saw him next he brought out of his pocket a crimson bottle-stopper of
no ordinary size, and after pledging me to strict secrecy—confided to
me that no king or emperor in the world possessed a finer ruby than
that which he then held in his hand. For the time was several months
later and poor Jacob was in a mental home where they were treating him
very kindly. But he never recovered from the result of his shock when
he discovered that he, the infallible Jacob W., had been the victim of his own faulty judgment and that his five-thousand-pound ruby was laboratory born.
There
is a footnote to manufactured rubies: manufactured alexandrites, which
are a variety of chrysoberyl, first discovered in 1833. Alexandrites
are found in the Ural Mountains * and were given their name to
celebrate the coming-of-age of the young Tsar Alexander II. When
faceted and polished they are translucent and lustrous, but they are
distinguished from all other gems by the intriguing way in which their
blue or dark-green daylight colour changes into raspberry red in
artificial light.
1
Alexandrites are also produced in Ceylon, but not such good ones as in
the Urals. For a long time the Ceylon gem dealers thought they were
green sapphires until a specimen was consigned to London where it was
tested by experts. The Ceylon Observer of January nth, 1887,
has an account of an alexandrite of immense size, 1876 carats—being a
carat for almost every year of the date. Its owner refused 10,000
rupees for it and it was eventually cut into small pieces.
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