In Season 6 Episode 1, Ruby had a temperature and she was murmuring a Romani phrase ‘Tickna Mora O Beng’. When Tommy hears this he returns home but by the time he reaches she seems to have recovered.
In Episode 2, her temperature rises again and this time she hears voices and sees a grey man with green eyes. Thomas being a believer in gypsy-tradition thinks that all of this is happening because of a curse. However, Lizzie believes that all of this is merely Thomas’ superstition and Ruby just needs to be treated.
So what exactly happened to Ruby?
Ruby was cursed by Navadni Barwell, due to which she gets diagnosed with tuberculosis. The disease spreads from one lung to the other and eventually, she dies.
There are numerous stories tied to Ruby’s condition. So I’ll be dissecting all the events around it for you to make complete sense of what happened to Ruby.
To understand this facet of the story, we have to go back in time. In Season 3, Thomas was doing business with a few Russians. One of them gives him a sapphire, which he gifts to Grace and quite lovingly ties it around her neck.
Grace wears it at an event, and one of the guests sees it. She tells Thomas how the sapphire seems to be cursed, and its power is so strong that even she can feel it. In the same episode, Grace is shot by one of Luca Changretta’s men, and she dies.
Thomas feels responsible for her death because he believes in curses and blames himself for giving the sapphire to Grace. So he goes to Madame Barwell, a gypsy woman, and gives the sapphire to her. She, in turn, gives it to her sister Navadni Barwell.
Navadni ties the sapphire around her daughter’s neck, and almost instantly, she starts coughing blood. Within seven hours, Navadni’s daughter succumbs to tuberculosis, and Navadni has no one to blame but Thomas. So she curses his daughter, Ruby.
Ruby’s Death from Tuberculosis
In Episode 2, Ruby also starts coughing up blood as her temperature rises to 101 degrees. She tells Lizzie how she’s hearing voices and sees a grey man with green eyes. She even mentions how this grey man is coming to get her and Thomas.
Before all this could be explained, she is taken to the hospital, where they diagnose her with tuberculosis. They first tell that it’s only in one lung and have a couple of treatments for the same.
The doctors first try to collapse her lung so that it recovers on its own. However, this doesn’t work, and the following remedy is to use gold salts. Whether they’re able to provide this remedy or not is unknown.
While all this is happening, Thomas is in the mountains searching for Esme because he thinks it is her curse. However, she tells the entire story about the sapphire, and he wants to find Navadni, he is unable to.
By the time Thomas returns, Lizzie tells how Ruby died, and Thomas wasn’t there by her side when she needed him the most. Although Lizzie doesn’t believe in the ‘gypsy-shit’ as she calls it, it is evident that Ruby’s death was because of the curse. She first coughed blood and then died from tuberculosis, just like Navadni’s daughter.
The Mystery Behind the Grey Man
Everything above covers Ruby’s arc in Episodes 2 and 3, but we’re still left with a couple of unanswered questions. We don’t know about the Romani phrase Ruby was murmuring, the voices she heard, and most importantly, the grey man.
We don’t know if these were premonitions of Thomas’ end or if they were related merely to the curse. Even if they were related to the curse, we don’t know how. What makes it even more intriguing is that the grey man with the green eyes was going to take both Ruby and Thomas away.
While Ruby has passed away, Thomas still lives. So is this a loose end that will be tied later in the show? Well, only time will tell, and I can’t wait to find out.
About Peaky Blinders
Peaky Blinders is a British period crime drama television series created by Steven Knight. Set in Birmingham, England, the series follows the exploits of the Shelby crime family and their leader Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) in the direct aftermath of the First World War.
The fictional family is loosely based on a real urban youth gang of the same name, active in the city from the 1890s to the early 20th century. It stars Cillian Murphy, Sam Claflin, Aidan Gillen, Helen McCrory, Paul Anderson, Finn Cole, and Tom Hardy
Netflix, under a deal with Weinstein Company and Endemol, acquired the rights to release the show in the United States and around the world. In January 2021, it was announced that the sixth series would be the last, followed by a spin-off film. The final series was broadcast in 2022.
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