I realized that I left a bit of a cliffhanger. Yes, I spent yesterday afternoon at the Gemological Appraisal Laboratory, having the diamond examined by a very pleasant and thorough young man, Travis Lejman. I highly recommend him.
Anyway, some of our suppositions about the stone were confirmed. It was cut sometime during the late 19th Century, polished and faceted by hand in the field (the angles of the top facets are now precisely equalized by computer-operated polishers, but this stone's eight main facets range anywhere from 30 degrees to 40 degrees from the top surface, so it's clear that the cutter wasn't using any kind of a jig). It really IS a diamond, a fact of which we hadn't been entirely sure. At one point, he put the stone into an optical scanner, a kind of 3-D external CAT scan that measures every dimension down to the micron and tenth of a degree, so I have an extraordinarily detailed diagram of every facet. I have a map of the various inclusions, a color judgment, a carat weight, and a retail replacement value. And I have a greatly enlarged photograph that a future jeweler or appraiser can use to verify that this stone matches the reporting.
I never did make it to Amsterdam Billiards yesterday afternoon, because I immediately came home and spent two hours writing about the lab experience and what we learned. There's a project in my head having to do with family histories, the nature of diamonds, and how the past remains a mystery even when we think we know its facts.
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