When viewed through the lens of modern power dynamics, Benedict asking someone who works for him to be his mistress is problematic. But in the early 1800s, making Sophie such an offer “is, honestly, exactly what he would have done,” Quinn said at a book event in 2023. “Even if he thought he loved her desperately, marriage would not have been the first thing on his mind because that’s just not how society worked then,” Quinn continued, hastening to add that, by book’s end, Benedict has reformed his rakish ways. “He did eventually realize being with her was more important to him, and then they did get married. As you’ll see in later books, they live a quiet life in the country because they kind of have to. It’s not a fully accepted marriage.”
This plot device is central to the book’s narrative, in that Benedict’s offer triggers Sophie’s feelings about not wanting to live the life her mother did as mistress to a man in upper society. It also exacerbates Benedict’s inner turmoil about pursuing Sophie while still pining for the elusive Lady in Silver. (In the novel, there is a two-year gap between when Sophie is fired from her home and when she reconnects with Benedict at her new place of employment, a timeline that gets condensed to weeks for the show.) But unlike the book, in which the word bastard is bandied about more than seems necessary when referring to Sophie, the series attempts to put our romantic heroine on equal footing with Benedict, despite their socioeconomic divide.
On both page and stage, Benedict attends a party where Sophie is working, defends her against her lecherous employer, then whisks them both away to his cottage, where Benedict recovers from an injury sustained in the confrontation. Stripped of the social conventions in polite society, Benedict and Sophie get to know one another on their own terms—not as maid and noble, but man and woman. Sophie has no delusions about what will become of their attraction: “Sons of viscounts did not marry baseborn nobodies,” she opines in the book. “Not even in romantic novels.”
In the book, Benedict makes his initial offer to Sophie at the cottage. “Be my mistress, and have this,” he tells her as they kiss—for the first time since locking lips at the masquerade ball, unbeknownst to Benedict. “I’ll dress you in silks, in satins,” he continues. “I’ll dress you in nothing at all.” That line stops Sophie in her tracks. “It wasn’t love, or any of those tender emotions she’d dreamed about, but lust,” Quinn writes. “And he wanted to make her a kept woman. Just as her mother had been.”
Sophie contemplates the offer, “but while she might be willing to make such decisions with her own life and reputation, she would not do so for a child,” Quinn writes. “And how could there not be a child? All mistresses eventually had children.”
