Rules for Being a Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

would have to learn to be more precise in her choice of words, and to elevate her conversation above these mundane matters in which he had no interest. To that end, he would recommend books for her, to improve her mind and refine her tongue. Her soft, creamy voice would remain unchanged. He didn’t even mind her Irish accent. It occurred to him suddenly that she might not be able to read at all; reading was widespread among women of the upper and middle classes, but most of the lower orders, both male and female, usually were illiterate. This was especially true in Ireland.
    “What do your friends call you?” she asked him suddenly. “Benny? Or Dick?”
    He was appalled. “Neither, I trust!”
    “They can’t call you Sir Benedict, ” she pressed him. “It’s unnatural.”
    “It is not unnatural,” he said stiffly. “It is my name. My brother and, occasionally, my sister, call me Ben,” he added reluctantly. “I don’t encourage it. I believe nicknames are a form of degradation.”
    “It’s a form of affection,” she argued, laughing. “Ben. I like it.”
    Rather to his own surprise, he made no objection to this form of degradation.
    She leaned toward him. “Did you know that, in the Italian language, ‘ben’ is an endearment?” she asked him.
    He shook his head. To his astonishment, she began to sing to him softly in Italian.
    “Caro mio ben,
credimi almen,
senza di te
languisce il cor.”
     
    He had not been sung to by a woman since his nursery days. Her voice was light and pleasing, though by no means perfect. As she sang, she moved her fingers along her knee as if she were playing the melody on a pianoforte. The simple, plaintive melody tugged at him, body and soul. Without understanding a word of Italian, he was seduced.
    She translated. “My dear beloved, believe me at least. In want of you, my heart languishes.” She laughed at his amazement. “Sure, I’m Italian in my heart.”
    “You should have lessons.”
    “Is it as bad as that?”
    “I didn’t mean—” he began quickly, but she waved him off.
    “It’s true, I’m no singer. All the lessons in the world won’t change that.”
    “But you’ve had some education,” he said cautiously.
    “Now that would be grievously overstating the matter! I’ll say this for my father: if ever any of his children wanted to learn something, he made it possible. Fortunately, hooligans like ourselves never do want to learn much.”
    He frowned. “Why do you say ‘fortunately’?”
    “We never had much money,” she explained without hesitation. “What we had, my father, in his wisdom, gambled away. He’d have been overwhelmed, poor man, if the five of us had been scholars! I remember, once it was so bad, we had to sell everything in the house, except for my pianoforte, and we ate our dinners off it because we had no table.”
    “Oh?” he said. “You play the pianoforte?”
    “At least as well as I sing,” she said. “My father won the pianoforte at cards when I was five. There was money then. I had lessons. It was the only thing he ever gave me that didn’t end up under the auctioneer’s hammer. Do you like music?”
    “Very much,” he said, but with the air of one closing a subject. “Miss Cosy, shall we speak plainly?”
    She looked at him in surprise. “Are we not speaking plainly now, Ben?”
    “I have enjoyed our conversation very much,” he began, looking at her directly. “You know, of course, that I’m an amputee. Tell me now if it disgusts you. I will not be offended.”
    For a moment she was too startled to answer, but her gaze did not falter. She said firmly, in a voice that rang true, “It does not disgust me, Ben. Why would you think so?”
    “Some females do find it rather off-putting. I don’t blame them.”
    “Then they don’t deserve the pleasure of your company,” she said indignantly.
    “I’m a single man,” he went on, encouraged, “and, like all single men of property, I must marry. I’ve