From The Glass Ocean: A Novel in Progress

Giorgio looks thoughtful for a moment, and then he says, Yes, this is a very good example of how things can go wrong, this case of Carlo Dell'oro of Urbino. He was a talented man, but nonetheless. . . . His was a story that the Old Ones told to us very often when we were little, it was our, how would you say it? Our bedtime story? Yes. We grew up on it. Shall I tell it to you now?

Leo is completely taken in, he nods, now that Giorgio has started talking, irresistibly as ever, he wants to hear it all.

Carlo Dell'oro lived a long time ago, Giorgio says, in the north, in Urbino . . . like your Papa used to be, he was a goldsmith, and just like your Papa, he was a very good one. Like all the Dell'oros he was a small man, neat, well turned-out, and in his manner grave, precise, and serious. Urbino was a very great city, a wealthy city, with palazzos, and fountains, and city squares, a real museo, and even a city hall whose parapets were decorated, so the Old Ones told us, with gold. A very wealthy city, and here lived this relative of mine and of yours, Carlo Dell'oro, and here he had his shop, a shop like himself, neat and small, with a modest little window, looking out upon the Avenida Clarissa, in which he displayed, each day, a single jewel upon a piece of velvet, black, blue, or red, depending, of course, upon the color of the stones. Yes, a single jewel, one each day—but what a jewel it was! For the work of Carlo Dell'oro, at the time when this story begins, was famous, and very much desired. His stones, so the Old Ones said, were of the most unusual colors, acquired by him from nobody knew where—the Orient, Africa, the Middle East, even South America perhaps. And these exotic stones of such rich color were cut, by Carlo Dell'oro's own hand, in a manner most peculiar, most remarkable: to the usual briolettes and pendeloques, rosettes, double rosettes, triple rosettes, peruzzis and Mazarins, he added peculiar facetings of his own, mysterious glyptics and intaglios, so that the stones revealed, to whoever gazed deeply within them, strange shapes and shadows. Yes, the cunning facets of Carlo Dell'oro were like mazes, young signore, within which the wealthy ladies and gentlemen might wander, searching, in this or that glimmer of light, for all sorts of fleeting and wonderful things. Sometimes there were seen within his stones the shapes of fish, or of birds; of faces, or numbers, or letters from alphabets so old that nobody could read them anymore, so indistinct that they could be seen only if the gem were held to capture the light just so. And in these elusive shapes and shadows, among these symbols, or perhaps, as it were, among these illusions, it was rumored that messages were hidden, which were intended to be read only by the wearer of the jewel—messages from the purchaser to the recipient, signore: billet-doux, secret and eternal love notes, most subtly graven into the stones! And some jewels, it was said, bore messages from Carlo Dell'oro, the jeweler, himself: secret warnings, sometimes, containing the foreknowledge of crimes that had not yet been committed, but would be committed, either to the profit or the loss of the wearer of the jewel—and other mysterious inklings, portents of the future, things which should have been known by none but God in heaven, except that somehow, Carlo Dell'oro also knew them. . . .

Nobody knew how these gems were cut, how the mysterious messages were placed within them; nor even how the gold settings were fashioned, for these, too, like the stones, were of the most excellent craft, and had a similarly enigmatic quality; what appeared, at first, straightforward work, would be revealed, upon close inspection, to be engraved with enigmatic runes and symbols, the remains, so it seemed, of an ancient language that only the jeweler understood...