This is a true story, retold as a tale. Margaret and her little jewelry shop are imagined, but everything she sees on the television, and everything that happens to the ring, really happened.
February 1981
The little jewelry shop on the corner smelled of polish and old wood. Margaret was twenty-two, and she had worked behind its counter for three years, learning the trade from her mother, who had learned it from hers.
That afternoon there were no customers. The two women had pulled the shop's small television onto the counter, because all of England was watching the same thing.
On the screen, a tall young woman with a shy smile stood beside the Prince of Wales. Her name was Lady Diana Spencer. She was nineteen years old, and she was going to be a princess.
"Look at her," Margaret's mother said softly. "She's only a baby."
Then the girl on the television lifted her left hand for the cameras, and both women leaned forward at the same moment.
On her finger was a sapphire. An enormous oval sapphire, deep royal blue, surrounded by a circle of diamonds that caught the light like frost.
"Oh," breathed Margaret's mother, a jeweler for forty years. "Oh, that is a beautiful stone."
The Ring Anyone Could Have
Over the next few days, the newspapers told the story. The ring had come from Garrard, the royal jewelers. And Diana had not been given a ring made specially for her, the way royal brides usually were. She had been shown a selection, and she had simply chosen the one she loved best.
Some people sniffed that it wasn't one of a kind. That anybody with enough money could buy the same design.
Margaret's mother laughed at that. "Don't you see?" she said. "That's exactly why everyone loves it. She picked it herself, like any girl would. It makes her one of us."
By the end of the week, the little shop's bell never stopped ringing. Young women came in with newspaper photos. Nervous young men came in with their savings. Everyone wanted the same thing: a blue sapphire with a halo of diamonds, just like Diana's.
Margaret sold more sapphires that spring than in the three years before. And every time she slid one across the counter, she thought of the shy girl on the television.
The Years Between
Margaret watched Diana's life the way the whole world did, in photographs and headlines. The wedding at St. Paul's, the two little boys, William and Harry. The sapphire was there in so many of the pictures, flashing as Diana waved, as she hugged children in hospitals, as she held her sons' hands.
Then the sad years came. The marriage fell apart. And on the last night of August 1997, the news came that Diana had died in a car accident in Paris. She was thirty-six.
The next morning Margaret, now running the shop herself, put a single white rose in the window. Her customers came in and stood quietly at the counter, not buying anything. Many of them were wearing sapphire rings.
November 2010
Margaret was sixty-one now, with reading glasses on a chain and a granddaughter named Lily who came to the shop after school. The same little television sat on the counter.
"Gran, come and look," Lily called. "Prince William's getting married!"
Margaret came over, drying her hands. On the screen stood Prince William, grown up now, with his mother's eyes. Beside him was a lovely young woman named Catherine Middleton.
Then Catherine lifted her left hand.
Margaret's breath caught. She took off her glasses, wiped them, put them back on.
It was the same ring. The same oval blue sapphire. The same halo of diamonds. Diana's ring.
On the television, William explained that he had carried it through Kenya in his rucksack for three weeks, terrified of losing it, until he asked Catherine to marry him. He said that giving her his mother's ring was his way of making sure his mother did not miss out on the day.
Margaret did not say anything for a while. Lily looked up and saw that her grandmother was crying.
"Gran? Are you sad?"
"No, love," said Margaret, and she laughed through her tears. "I'm not sad at all. That ring has just come home."
The Legend and the Truth
Lady Diana Spencer's engagement to the Prince of Wales was announced on February 24, 1981. Her ring, chosen by Diana herself from a selection by Garrard, the royal jewelers, featured an oval blue Ceylon sapphire of about twelve carats surrounded by fourteen diamonds in white gold. It inspired a worldwide wave of sapphire engagement rings.
Diana and Charles divorced in 1996, and Diana died in Paris in August 1997. In October 2010, Prince William proposed to Catherine Middleton in Kenya with his mother's ring, which he had carried in his rucksack for about three weeks. When their engagement was announced in November 2010, he explained that it was his way of making sure his mother was part of the day. Once again, sapphire engagement rings became a global favorite.
Every heirloom ring carries a story like this one: someone who chose it, someone who loved the person wearing it, and someone who carried it forward.
💡 Read more legends and true stories of sapphire in The Legends of Sapphire: The Stone of Heaven.
🛍️ Begin Your Own Story
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