Mary, Lady Stewart’s One-Of-A-Kind Cartier Jewellery

Mary Stewart’s first novel “Madam Will You Talk” was published in 1955 and started a career that would span many decades and millions of books sold. While best known for her romance-suspense books, Stewart also produced a wonderful quintet of Arthurian novels that capitalised on the likes of Tolkein and Lewis helping to bring fantasy out of children’s literature and into its own genre.

Other popular female suspense authors at the time, such as Georgette Heyer were often criticised for making their heroines as overly practical or naïve. However, Stewart created well rounded, likable protagonists that have stood the test of time and continue to delight readers today.

One of her best known novels “The Moonspinners”, set on the Greek Island of Crete follows the story of intrepid Nicola and her unexpected island adventures. Fellows is delighted to offer for sale the brooch Stewart commissioned Cartier to make after the publication of this novel.

However, what is a moon-spinner? Not the sails of a Cretan windmill on a clear evening or the ripples of the sea under a dazzling full moon but instead they are creatures of legends; best described by Stewart herself:

They’re naiads – water nymphs. Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and onto these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don’t carry a distaff. They’re not Fates, or anything terrible; they don’t affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grows on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest, and the creatures of the hillsides are safe from the hunter, and the tides are still . . .

Then, on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising above the sea, just a thin curved thread, re-appearing in the sky. Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moon-spinners start their work once more, to make the night safe for hunted things . .

 

Cartier has embraced the legend in the design of this brooch. The yellow diamonds create the waning moon, being spun out of the night’s sky by the colourless diamonds of the water nymphs. The brooch tells a touching story, not just of the disappearing moon and beautiful water nymphs but the imagination of talented craftsman and the success  of one of Britain’s finest novelists.