Jacob
Reconstructed memorial. Jacob was the campaign’s working-class anchor, and his death its cruellest irony.
Chapter 1 — London
Jacob was Ravenwood House’s coachman, a weathered, solid man of thirty-eight who said little and listened well. A former soldier who had seen unspeakable things in Ireland during the Rebellion, he carried a locket with a woman’s portrait and never spoke of her, kept a pistol under his coat, and served the Order of St Aelfric loyally without ever being a formal member. When Phil joined the table, Jacob stepped up from the driver’s bench: watchman, driver, and muscle for the investigators, a servant among gentlefolk who was frequently the most useful person in the room.
Chapter 2 — Lyon: The Orphans’ Hospital
At the Orphans’ Hospital, the party found Dr. Carreau performing surgery on a child in the basement. Emma shot him, and Jacob finished it, pinning Carreau to the ground with a sword to protect the child on the table. Upstairs, minutes earlier, he had rushed to save the dying Gus and botched the field dressing catastrophically, killing the man he was trying to rescue.
His reward for the basement came seconds later. Marina, driven into temporary insanity by the horrors around her, looked at Carreau’s body and saw her own brother, and she shot Jacob dead where he stood. He killed a friend by accident and was killed by a friend’s madness inside the same hour, a cascade of good intentions producing catastrophe that made the Orphans’ Hospital the darkest single scene of the campaign. Phil’s next character, Commissaire Jules Delaroche, joined the fight against Savarin within days.