"No no, I want you to pick one out for me," he says, quickly, because he'd already sent in a commission for an artist in London to be picked up once they returned, and it would be rather gauche, he thinks, to pick out a ring for himself and surprise Crowley with one of his own.

"And I don't want it to be miracled." That's why he'd gone to an artist - the stones, he'd procured from his own private collection, things he'd stowed away hundreds of years ago and never looked at since. Gifts from the Medicis, from Queen Elizabeth, from Louis XIV.

And he'd chosen a blood-red ruby, one of the oldest things in his collection.