Although if truth be told, This Author should not give the impression that the aforementioned Mr. Bridgerton has been spending his every waking hour in debauched abandon. If accounts are correct, he has spent most of the past fortnight in his lodgings on Bruton Street.
As there have been no rumors that he is ill, This Author can only assume that he has finally come to the conclusion that the London season is utterly dull and not worth his time.
Smart man, indeed.
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 9 JUNE 1817
Sophie didn’t see Benedict for a full fortnight. She didn’t know whether to be pleased, surprised, or disappointed. She didn’t know whether she was pleased, surprised, or disappointed.
She didn’t know anything these days. Half the time she felt like she didn’t even know herself.
She was certain that she had made the right decision in yet again refusing Benedict’s offer. She knew it in her head, and even though she ached for the man she loved, she knew it in her heart. She had suffered too much pain from her bastardy ever to risk imposing the same on a child, especially one of her own.
No, that was not true. She had risked it once. And she couldn’t quite make herself regret it. The memory was too precious. But that didn’t mean she should do it again.
But if she was so certain that she’d done the right thing, why did it hurt so much? It was as if her heart were perpetually breaking. Every day, it tore some more, and every day, Sophie told herself that it could not get worse, that surely her heart was finished breaking, that it was finally well and fully broken, and yet every night she cried herself to sleep, aching for Benedict.
And every day she felt even worse.
Her tension was intensified by the fact that she was terrified to step outside the house. Posy would surely be looking for her, and Sophie thought it best if Posy didn’t find her.
Not that she thought Posy was likely to reveal her presence here in London to Araminta; Sophie knew Posy well enough to trust that Posy would never deliberately break a promise. And Posy’s nod when Sophie had been frantically shaking her head could definitely be considered a promise.
But as true of heart as Posy was when it came to keeping promises, the same could not, unfortunately, be said of her lips. And Sophie could easily imagine a scenario—many scenarios as a matter of fact—in which Posy would accidentally blurt out that she’d seen Sophie. Which meant that Sophie’s one big advantage was that Posy didn’t know where Sophie was staying. For all she knew, Sophie had just been out for a stroll. Or maybe Sophie had come to spy on Ara-minta.
In all truth, that seemed an awful lot more plausible than the truth, which was that Sophie just happened to have been blackmailed into taking a job as a lady’s maid just down the street.
And so, Sophie’s emotions kept darting back and forth from melancholy to nervous, brokenhearted to downright fearful.
She’d managed to keep most of this to herself, but she knew she had grown distracted and quiet, and she also knew that Lady Bridgerton and her daughters had noticed it. They looked at her with concerned expressions, spoke with an extra gentleness. And they kept wondering why she did not come to tea.
“Sophie! There you are!”
Sophie had been hurrying to her room, where a small pile of mending awaited, but Lady Bridgerton had caught her in the hall.
She stopped and tried to manage a smile of greeting as she bobbed a curtsy. “Good afternoon, Lady Bridgerton.”
“Good afternoon, Sophie. I have been looking all over for you.”
Sophie stared at her blankly. She seemed to do a lot of that lately. It was difficult to focus on anything. “You have?” she asked.
“Yes. I was wondering why you haven’t been to tea all week. You know that you are always invited when we are taking it informally.”
Sophie felt her cheeks grow warm. She’d been avoiding tea because it was just so hard to be in the same room with all those Bridgertons at once and not to think of Benedict.
They all looked so alike, and whenever they were together they were such a family.
It forced Sophie to remember everything that she didn’t have, reminded her of what she’d never have: a family of her own.
Someone to love. Someone who’d love her. All within the bounds of respectability and marriage.
She supposed there were women who could throw over respectability for passion and love. A very large part of her wished she were one of those women. But she was not. Love could not conquer all. At least not for her.
“I’ve been very busy,” she finally said to Lady Bridgerton.
Lady Bridgerton just smiled at her—a small, vaguely inquisitive smile, imposing a silence that forced Sophie to say more.
“With the mending,” she added.
“How terrible for you. I wasn’t aware that we’d poked holes in quite so many stockings.”
“Oh, you haven’t!” Sophie replied, biting her tongue the minute she said it. There went her excuse. “I have some mending of my own,” she improvised, gulping as she realized how bad that sounded. Lady Bridgerton well knew that Sophie had no clothes other than the ones she had given her, which were all, needless to say, in perfect condition. And besides, it was very bad form for Sophie to be doing her own mending during the day, when she was meant to be waiting on the girls. Lady Bridgerton was an understanding employer; she probably wouldn’t have minded, but it went against Sophie’s own code of ethics. She’d been given a job—a good one, even if it did involve getting her heart broken on a day to day basis—and she took pride in her work.