Diksha Sundriyal
The fourth season of Netflix’s ‘Bridgerton’ turns the spotlight towards Benedict, the free-spirited second sibling who finally decides to settle down after he meets a mysterious Lady in Silver during his mother’s masquerade ball. This lady is revealed to be Sophie, whom Benedict later meets and falls in love with, without knowing that she is the woman he has been looking for all along. Halfway through the season, he proposes to her, asking her to be his mistress. He thinks she will readily accept it, but she leaves him in confusion, and her silence becomes her answer. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Benedict Tries to Find an Unconventional Happy Ending With Sophie
Despite their clear and immediate attraction for each other, Benedict and Sophie come from two different worlds. While he is an aristocrat with a high stature in society, she is a commoner, a maid, who is well below his station. The fact that he is even friendly with her would be frowned upon by others, and Benedict knows that, despite being the rebellious son who doesn’t like to follow the rules, he cannot marry his maid, no matter how much he is in love with her. This is a social line that he cannot cross without dooming his entire family in the process, especially considering that he still has younger, unwed sisters, who would never find a respectable match if he didn’t marry the right person in the eyes of society. So, even as he contemplates being with Sophie, he knows they can never legitimately be together. But then, he finds out about his friend keeping a mistress, a woman that he actually loves, as opposed to the one he is to marry.
Initially, Benedict is torn between his love for the Lady in Silver and Sophie. He cannot shake the memory of the evening he spent with the mysterious woman at the masquerade ball. She is everything that he wants in a woman he’d like to marry, including the fact that she is a lady. Being with her would cause him no problems. But as months pass and she is still not found, he starts to wonder if he is chasing a fantasy. At one point, it is believed that he may have found the Lady in Silver, but even in that moment, he can’t stop thinking about Sophie. It is a relief when he discovers that the woman in front of him is not the one he has been looking for. Seeing him dejected, his mother advises him to turn towards reality and look for someone else with whom he feels the spark. This allows him to let go of the Lady in Silver, and that same evening, he decides that he will be with Sophie.
Because they cannot actually marry each other without being shunned from society, there is only one option: she must become his mistress. This would allow them to be together, for him to provide for her with everything, except the legitimacy of being his wife. When he takes this idea to her, he thinks she will readily accept it because she, too, understands the way things work. By this time, her feelings for him have also become apparent, so, in his head, the idea of him asking her to be his mistress is actually romantic. However, he fails to see things from Sophie’s perspective, which is why he is so surprised when she leaves without giving him an answer.
Benedict’s Proposal Hits a Nerve With Sophie
Unbeknownst to Benedict, Sophie is a child of an affair between a nobleman and his maid. She never knew her mother, so she doesn’t know why she agreed to be her father’s mistress. And while her father took her in as his ward and promised to provide for her no matter what, she was abandoned when he died and apparently left her with nothing. So, as a child of an affair, all she has known is rejection and abandonment. She was never openly accepted by her father as his child, and on his death, she was stuck as a maid in the very house she grew up in. So, she knows, firsthand, that the consequences of one’s affair are felt by their children.
She knows that if she ever has an illegitimate child, they, too, would have to go through the same thing she did, and that’s not what she wants. She knows that she, too, will be forgotten, like her mother was, and her children will grow up cursing her for her choices. With all this in mind, when Benedict proposes to her to be his mistress, the bubble of her fantasy is immediately broken. Despite her love for him, she had always known that nothing could happen between them. She even tried to keep her distance, but then he employed her at the Bridgerton house, and crossing paths with him became inevitable. So, eventually, when he professes his love for her, claiming that she is all he thinks about and wants to be with, she almost slips into the fantasy of being with him.
She lets herself believe that they can be together, and she can have the love and the life she wants. It is when he says the word “mistress” that her feet touch the ground again, and she leaves. While she may not have outright rejected him, her silence is a resounding no, and that is what it will remain. Having been through a harsh life of being an illegitimate child, she is immovable in her stance and will never be Benedict’s, or anyone else’s, mistress. She’d rather not be with him than be with him as someone who will never be accepted by society. This, however, doesn’t mean that they will not end up together. The story is yet to take more twists and turns, all of which will make Benedict and Sophie so entangled with each other that they will end up breaking the social barriers between them once and for all.
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