Jane Radcliffe
Reconstructed memorial. Jane died at Drury Lane long before story files existed. She was Juel’s first character, and the campaign’s first great con.
Chapter 0.1 — The Long Corridor
Miss Jane Radcliffe, real name Maggie Rowlins, was a con artist from Shaftesbury who had talked her way into an indefinite stay with the Northlake family on the strength of a hard-luck tale about a lost carriage. Born into poverty and made angry by service in a wealthy house, she had studied the laws and etiquette of her employers, stolen the dresses and jewellery to match, and built a society lady out of nerve and observation. Her plan at Northlake Hall was the usual one: milk the family and move on. The plan was failing before the ball even started, because she had grown fond of them, and Elizabeth Northlake had become the first true friend she ever had.
Then the Long Corridor opened, and the con artist found herself standing with Marina Garrick, Emma Wentworth, Georgiana Wentworth, and James Bennet against squat, headless Horrors from the far side of a portal. She survived both expeditions in. James Bennet did not. When Lady Honoria Lyndhurst came to recruit the survivors afterwards, Jane, who had spent her whole life running from institutions, joined one. Through the winter of 1813 she trained at Hartwell House with the Order’s instructors, a pickpocket being taught by duellists and occultists, and taking to it.
Chapter 0.5 — The Scandal Beneath the Stage
Drury Lane was a job built for her. Inside Giles Mercer’s resetting time loop, it was Jane’s hands that mattered: the key to Mercer’s private chest hung on the ring of the actor Edwin Slade, and on the second loop Jane lifted it from him with a distraction and a deft pickpocketing, exactly the skills the Order had recruited her for and precisely the ones no gentlewoman in the party could supply.
Breaking the loop took two failed attempts, and the answer, when they found it, needed two people acting at once in two places. Gus burned the monologue while Jane broke the mirror in the back room. The ritual shattered, and the false theatre began collapsing into a devouring maw around them as they ran. Jane fell during the escape, was trapped, and was left behind as the collapse took her, swallowed by the dying theatre in December 1813. The con artist’s last act in the world was the honest one that saved everyone else in the building. Juel’s next character, Charlotte Thorne, arrived at a Bath wedding five months later.