Billy Pot
Billy Pot once had a pet shop that specialized in reptiles. Billy loved lizards and snakes, and he specialized in breeding purple pythons. The biggest python that Billy Pot had ever bred lived in the backyard of Terry Tarsal's shoe shop. Terry, who did not like snakes, very reluctantly used their sloughed skin for Marcia's pointy snakeskin shoes.
When the Supreme Custodian bought a colony of snapping turtles from Billy and then ordered him to move to the Palace to look after them, Billy did not dare refuse. Billy's niece, Sandra, took over the pet shop and to Billy's great disapproval started selling fancy hamsters and fluffy rabbits. Sandra's new line in cuddly animals proved very popular, and she soon offered to buy the pet shop from Billy.
With the money Sandra had given him for the pet shop, Billy set up the lizard lodges down by the river, built the Contraption and embarked on his never-ending quest for the perfect lawn. When the Heaps moved into the Palace with Jenna, Silas asked Billy to stay on and help them get rid of the snapping turtles. Billy agreed, but the job proved impossible and he gave up after he nearly lost a finger to a particularly aggressive turtle.
Una Brakket
Una Brakket was housekeeper at the Young Army Barracks when Septimus was a toddler. Una did not like boys, even subdued and scared Young Army boys; she soon got a transfer and became housekeeper to the Hunter and his Pack. Una admired the Hunter very much indeed, although it is doubtful whether the Hunter even noticed her. He once asked her where his socks were, and Una went around in a daydream for days afterward. After that she took to hiding the Hunter's socks so that he might ask her again, but he never did.
When the Supreme Custodian fled and Jenna came back to live in the Palace as Princess, Una took advantage of Marcia and Alther's Second-Chance Scheme. She applied for a job as Palace housekeeper, which she did not get as Sarah Heap thought she was scary. The Scheme eventually referred her to Professor Weasal Van Klampff, who only took her on because he was too frightened to refuse.
However, Una's sympathies still lay with DomDaniel, and she joined the Restoration Unit, a secret network of people who wished to see him return. They met every Saturday night under the pretense of country dancing classes. It was through them that Una was put in touch with Simon Heap.
Professor Weasal Van Klampff
Weasal Van Klampff came from a long line of Professors. Many hundreds of years ago, Professor Doris Van Klampff had worked out a secret and very complicated formula for getting rid of Hauntings. This included Shadows, such as Marcia's, and Spectres like the one that had Waited for Alther when he was Apprentice to DomDaniel. Although the Van Klampffs had great mathematical ability, they tended to be rather gullible and extremely forgetful; Weasal was no exception.
After Weasal's father, Otto, blew himself upalong with the original Van Klampff Laboratorywhile mixing some volatile Amalgam, Weasal decided to give up experimenting and live a quiet life beside the Moat. On moving into his house on Snake Slipway, he was dismayed to find an ancient laboratory tucked away at the end of a warren of tunnels. Weasal spent many years trying to ignore the laboratory, but in the end the temptation was too great, and he decided to carry on his father's work. He perfected Otto's Amalgam so that it acted as a highly efficient screen for Darke energy, thus unwittingly providing an ideal hiding place for DomDaniel's bones. Weasal Van Klampff was a trusting man and had no idea that Una Brakket belonged to the Restoration Unit.
Beetle
Beetle was an only child. He grew up in The Ramblingshis parents had two large rooms on the floor immediately below the Heap family. One of Beetle's earliest memories was his mother banging on the ceiling with a broom handle, yelling, "For heaven's sake be quiet!" His parents refused to let Beetle have anything to do with the Heaps, which only made them more attractive, and he soon struck up a friendship with Jo-Jo Heap, who was the same age.
At the age of eleven, Beetle passed the highly competitive entrance test to the Manuscriptorium, much to his mother's delight. He started as General Dogsbody, and after the Inspection Clerk fell off the sled and broke his ankle, Beetle was trusted enough to take over the weekly inspections of the Ice Tunnels.
Beetle liked Septimus a lot; he reminded him of Jo-Jo, but he also shared Beetle's interest in Magyk and his liking for weird fizzy drinks. Beetle shared Septimus's dislike of Darke Magyk for, as he once said to Septimus over a mug of FizzFroot, "All that Darke stuff is depressing. When that awful old bloke came back to the Wizard Tower my hamster died, my mum got a huge boil on the end of her nose and the cat ran away. All because Darke stuff stuck to me at work, and then I brought it home. Horrible."
Septimus liked Beetle a lot too. He trusted him completely.
Boris Catchpole
Ever since he could remember, Boris Catchpole had been known by his last name. His mother had tried her best to call him Boris, but by the time he had started toddling she, like everyone else, had given up and reverted to plain Catchpolesomehow Boris seemed just too familiar.
Catchpole's ambition was to be a Hunter. He had run away from home and joined the Hunting Pack in the Badlands while DomDaniel had been preparing the assassination of the Queen. Catchpole had trained hard with the Pack, but he was not popular. He had given up cleaning his teeth as a boy and had no intention of starting again now that he did not have his mother telling him to. He had a nervous habit of clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth that made people feel snappy, and, to top it all, he was growing fast and was soon too tall to make a good Hunter.
Catchpole, true to his name, became Deputy Hunter but progressed no farther. After the overthrow of the Supreme Custodian he joined the Second-Chance Scheme and was accepted as a sub-Wizarda new trainee Wizard post for those of more mature years or no Magykal background.
Catchpole's ambition was now to be a proper Wizard. At the very least he wanted to be an Ordinary Wizard, but he had decided that he would not turn down the job of ExtraOrdinary Wizard if it were offered to him. It never was.
Jannit Maarten
If you asked Jannit Maarten to describe herself, she would say, "boat builder." And that is all she would say. Jannit had little time for politics and even less time for Wizards. Whatever went on in the Castle was of no concern to Jannit, whose whole world consisted of her boatyard just outside the Castle walls. She slept soundly in her hammock at night, rose at dawn and spent all daylight hours happily building, mending, painting and scrapingand all the other hundreds of wonderfully time-consuming fiddly things that boats require.
Although Nicko found it hard to believe, Jannit had once been a little girl, but she had forgotten all about itpossibly because she had grown up on a small farm in the middle of the Farmlands and had disliked chickens, hated cows and loathed pigs. Her parents never understood why, at fourteen, Jannit had dressed as a boy and run away to sea. At nineteen she returned with a ship of her own and set up the Jannit Maarten Boatyard next to the derelict Castle Customs Quay. Jannit was entirely happy with her life and set foot outside her beloved boatyard with great reluctance.
Sleuth
Sleuth had once been a tennis ball. It had spent two years lying in a damp ditch beside the Port Municipal Real Tennis House after someone had hit it out the window in a fit of temper; it had been seriously nibbled by mice and was slowly falling apart, until one day Simon Heap picked it up, put it in his pocket and took it back to the Observatory.
Over the next few months, Sleuth lay in a Sealed box, which Simon Heap carefully tended. He regularly filled and refilled the box with gases and potions, chanted over it for long hours and encircled it with Reverse Charms. As Sleuth gradually became conscious, it heard incantations muttered over it at midnight and smelled the Darke fumes that Simon wafted through the box. It had lain there, confused but excited, waiting to see what was going to happen.
Then, one night, at the Dark of the Moon, Sleuth was let out of its box and saw the world for the first time. It liked what it saw and Simon Heap was equally pleased with his creation. Sleuth glowed brightly and seemed intelligent; it was obedient and quick to learn. Soon it followed its Master everywhere and became Simon Heap's most loyal and faithful servant.
Nurse Meredith
Nurse Agnes Meredith, ex-Matron Midwife, ex-baby snatcher, made her way to the Port after being released from the Castle Asylum for Deluded and Distressed Persons. She walked the streets looking for her son, Merrin, but she had no luck. Eventually she ran out of the allowance the Asylum had given her and found a job as a cleaner in a seedy lodging house in the Rope Walk, next to the Port Witch Coven.
The owner of the lodging house was a Mrs. Florrie Bundy, a large woman of short temper and long memory. Florrie had numerous ongoing feuds with her neighbors, the Port Witches, and it was a heated argument over a used teabagwhich Florrie claimed had been deliberately aimed at her headthat led to her demise. Linda, who one day for want of nothing better to do had indeed thrown a teabag at Florrie's head, eventually got tired of being yelled at and placed a Shrink Spell on Florrie. Over the course of a few weeks the Shrink Spell gradually reduced Florrie to the size of a teabag herself, and one frosty morning she slipped on some ice, fell down the drain outside the backdoor and drowned.
Agnes Meredith had watched Florrie Shrinking with great interest. One day, when she could no longer find the diminutive landlady, Nurse Meredith took over the lodging house as though nothing had happened. She soon made it her ownhanging flock wallpaper, writing whimsical messages to stick on the walls and filling the house with dried flowers and dolls. She enjoyed the company of her dolls, and after a while she stopped looking for Merrin. At least you knew where you were with dolls, she told herself.