Yes, Your Grace (I): Put My Name In It

Two court musicians in Florence, three coppers left in the till. The Duke walks in wanting something new — solemn but lively, fresh but familiar — with no budget, and one more thing: put his name in the music. Not on the title page. In it. Where people can hear it.

That spring we had three coppers left.

I counted them three times. Three the first time, three the second, three the third. You may think counting three times is idiotic, but you do this work long enough and you learn that coppers are like a client’s promises: look away and they thin out on their own.

Nina sat by the window tuning. She has a bad habit when she tunes — she will turn a peg four or five times, past it and back again, and will not let go until she has heard the one that is right. The whole street knows her ear is deadly. The whole street also knows that a deadly ear is worth nothing in this trade.

“What about last month’s?” She did not look up.

“With the Duke.”

“The month before?”

“Also with the Duke.”

The string stopped.

“So what do we have now?”

I pushed the three coppers to the middle of the table. I pushed them slowly, so they would make a little noise on the wood and seem like more.

“Three.”

She finally looked up.

“Three coppers.”

“Three coppers,” I said, “and all of Florence has heard us.”

I did not make that up. The Duke said it himself last autumn. The original was longer and came with gestures. I wrote it down, because I had discovered it was useful — every time this trade has me on the edge of laughing out of sheer spite, I take that line out and read it once, and when I am done I am not angry anymore. I am laughing.

Before I go on I should tell you something. What happens next will sound absurd to you. It sounded absurd to me at the time. But this is how the trade turns, and it did not start with the Duke and it will not end with him. I am going to tell it to you exactly as it happened. You judge.

The door went.

Not a knock. A push. In all of Florence there is only one man who pushes our door without knocking.

“Busy?”

I was on my feet at once. I have practiced this one for two years; it does not go through my brain anymore — backside off the stool, right hand sweeps the coppers into my sleeve, and the face arrives by itself.

“Your Grace.”

Aldobrandino de’ Medici stood in the doorway with one hand still on the frame, as if he might leave at any moment, though I knew he would not. He always stands there and says everything he came to say, and never sits down. He says that sitting down to discuss a thing makes you look like you are asking for something.

“Festival’s next month. I want something new.”

“In what key?” Nina asked. She was still on that string.

“Key doesn’t matter.” The Duke waved it off. “Let me tell you what I want. Solemn. But lively.”

Nina’s pen stopped above the parchment. I watched the pen. It stayed there for three breaths.

“I want them awestruck,” the Duke went on, “and I want them to want to dance.”

The pen was still there.

“Fresh,” said the Duke. “But make them feel like they’ve heard it before.”

Nina put the pen down. She put it down very gently, which is a danger signal; anyone who knows her knows it. She lifted her head and asked, with complete sincerity:

”…Like Canon?”

The Duke snapped his fingers.

“Yes! That’s the one!”

He came half a step forward and spread both hands, as if to gather the whole room into his arms. Every time he makes that gesture, a summation follows.

“Bottom line — it’s got to have class.”

I need to stop here.

I have been in this trade eleven years. I have lost count of the clients. But I can tell you one thing and stand behind it: every client knows Canon.

Not some of them. Every one. It may be the only piece they have heard all the way through in their lives, but that one is enough — because Canon is not a piece of music in their heads, it is an adjective. It means that thing that sounds good but I can’t tell you why. You can give them anything at all, as long as at the end they can say, “Yes. That’s the feeling.”

So Nina’s “like Canon?” was not a question. It was a test. She wanted to see whether this Duke was like all the others.

He was like all the others.

“Your Grace,” Nina said, “about the fee for this one—”

She did not finish. She did not have to.

The room went quiet. When I say quiet I do not mean there was no sound; I mean that other thing — there is a kind of silence that has weight, and when it comes down on you, you can feel your own ears hunting for a sound and not finding one.

“There’s no gold on this one,” the Duke said.

He was smiling when he said it. I thought about that smile for a long time afterward. It was not an embarrassed smile and it was not an apologetic one. It was an expansive smile, almost a generous one — he was giving us something, and he genuinely believed that something was good.

He held two beats. He has the length of two beats down exactly: long enough for us to swallow the disappointment, not long enough for us to get a word out.

“But all of Florence will hear it. I’m telling you, for you two this is an opportunity. Not bad, eh? Not bad at all.”

I should explain “not bad.” It is his phrase, and in his mouth it means magnificent. People hearing it for the first time always falter for a second, and when they are done faltering they find they have been a little bit persuaded. The beauty of the construction is that it sounds like he is appraising the thing on your behalf — not like he is saving money on his own.

Then he waited. He always does: he throws out a line and waits for you to take it.

I took it. It is what I am for.

“His Grace is right,” I said, turning to you. “It’s an opportunity. We’ve already collected three.”

He got to the door, hand already on the frame, and turned around.

Every real requirement arrives at this moment. I have kept count. The thing a client says with his hand on the doorframe matters more than everything he said before it put together — because he had not planned to say it. It only just occurred to him. And the thing that only just occurred to him is usually the thing he actually wants.

“One more,” said the Duke. “Put my name in the music.”

“On the title page?” Nina asked.

“No.”

He let go of the frame and came back half a step.

“In the music. I want them to hear it.”

The door closed.

That left the two of us, and the three coppers — still in my sleeve. I had not had a chance to put them back.

Nina looked at that door for a long time. Then she said:

“Does he know what he just asked for?”

“No.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because it has class,” I said.

The door opened again.

This time it had been knocked on. Three knocks, not soft, not hard, evenly spaced. In all of Florence only one man knocks like that, and he always has a ledger in his hand.

“Gentlemen,” said the steward. “About the piece His Grace mentioned.”

“Are you here to settle last month?” I asked. I ask every time. It has become a ritual between us, the way some people discuss the weather.

“Procedurally,” said the steward, “there has to be a piece first.”

“But a piece needs a budget first,” said Nina.

“Procedurally,” said the steward, “a budget needs a piece first.”

I counted three seconds. One, two, three.

Nobody spoke in those three seconds, because there was nothing to say. This is not a thing you can argue with. It is a closed thing; it bites its own tail; you go in at any point and you come out at the same point. You cannot refute a circle.

“And there it is,” I said to you.

The steward rolled up the ledger and started for the door. At the door he stopped — the door again. I told you: the doorway is the real council chamber.

“Oh. Her Grace says she doesn’t care for long ones.”

“How long is long?” Nina asked.

“Procedurally,” said the steward, “it isn’t specified.”

The door closed.

Night came.

We lit one lamp. One, not for the atmosphere, but because oil costs money. Nina laid the lute across her knees. I flattened the parchment and weighted the four corners with the three coppers — three coppers, four corners. Now you know how we were living.

“Aldobrandino de’ Medici,” I read out, the whole name.

“And?”

“Take the vowels out. A, O, A, I, U.”

This trick is real. I did not invent it and my generation did not invent it. Somebody really did write this sort of thing for a duke once — pull the vowels out of a name one by one, match them to the syllables of the scale, spell out a line of notes, and then tell the duke: listen, Your Grace. This is you.

The man who invented it was a genius. Not because the trick is clever — the trick is fairly stupid — but because he had seen through one thing: what a client wants has never been a good piece of music. It is a piece of music that belongs to him. Those two are the same thing only very rarely.

“So?” said Nina.

“So: fa, sol, la, mi, ut.”

She tried it. F, G, A, E, C.

The first three climb nicely, like they are going somewhere. The fourth one falls straight off. The fifth one follows it down.

She stopped.

“Why are there two of the same note in here?”

The name was not finished. Dux Florentiae — the Duke, the Duke of Florence. U is ut again, O is sol, E is re, I is mi, A is fa, E is re again.

C — G, D, E, F, D.

“That part is ‘the Duke,’” I said.

She played the whole thing through. Eleven notes. When she finished, her hand stayed on the last fret; she did not lift it.

There was only the wick, ticking.

“This isn’t a melody,” she said.

“It’s his name.”

She did not answer. After a while she took her hand off the neck and held it up in front of the lamp and looked at it.

Then she said:

“Why does this hand have six fingers?”

“Don’t move,” I said. “It’ll pass in a minute.”

Some things I do not intend to explain.

The next day, in daylight, the Duke came with the steward. He did not sit. He never sits. But this time he stood close to the table, close enough that I could smell the spice on his sleeve.

“Play.”

We played.

I will admit we had put work into it. The same eleven notes, but we spread them out, slow and wide; we put an introduction in front; we gave every note its own harmony in the middle; and that last D, which has no cadence in it, we propped up with a run of broken chords until whoever was listening believed it was an ending.

A large and extremely solemn occasion, held up by a string of notes that is not a melody at all.

The Duke nodded with his eyes closed. The rhythm of his nodding had nothing to do with the music, but his timing was perfect — perfect in that every nod landed exactly where he felt moved.

It ended.

Silence.

Then the Duke clapped three times, by himself.

I want you to remember those three. Not two, not four. Three, not fast, not slow, evenly spaced. He was the only person in the room clapping, and he did it with complete ease, not the least bit awkward — because in his experience the room was full of people, all of them clapping, and he was simply the loudest.

“That’s what I wanted,” he said. “Solemn. And lively.”

“Her Grace said a touch short,” said the steward.

“Then make it more solemn,” said the Duke.

Nina and I looked at each other.

I could write a whole chapter about that look, but I will say one thing only: there was no anger in it and no self-pity. In that look were two people who work for a living, confirming the same fact — there is no longer any relationship between what he says and what we do, and there never was.

“He heard himself,” I said to you.

After they left, it got dark again.

We did not clear anything away. Nina picked up the lute again and I sat down across from her. One lamp left; the oil in the other had burned out the night before.

She started it.

The same eleven notes, not one more, not one less. But she played them slowly, three times slower. Underneath she walked a descending bass line, step by step downward, like someone going down a staircase in the dark. I came in half a beat behind her.

And then something happened.

The notes turned beautiful.

I do not know how to tell you about this. The same notes, the same order; last night it was garbage, a string of things gouged out of a man’s name that anybody could hear was not a melody. Tonight it became something else. It had a direction. It had weight. It set out from somewhere and it arrived somewhere.

In those thirty-five seconds neither of us said a word.

I am not going to say much here either. If you play, you know what I am talking about. If you do not play, nothing I say will help.

I will tell you one thing only, a thing I have thought about for a long time:

The Duke bought eleven notes.

He got them. Those eleven notes really are his name, they really did sound at the festival, they really were heard by all of Florence. He received everything he asked for, down to the last particle.

As for those thirty-five seconds — they were not among the things he bought. They were ours.

The lamp was nearly out. Nina put the lute back on the wall and walked to the door to close it. The door was already closed. She stood there, facing a closed door, and said, very calmly:

“Your Grace, about the balance—”

Nobody in the room answered.

Nobody outside did either.