Friends and associates of the Family

**Merlin Parsloe**

The former Curate at Blandings Parva (who may have been at Oxford with several of the players). Hasn’t a bean but loves Mirelle. He has now taken up a missionary post in West Africa and is believed to have left the country.

**Morganthe Apmoire**

Random’s first love – a girl on the stage who he bombarded with letters and poetry to little avail.

In actual fact, Morganthe Apmoire was a stage name and she is really Morganthe Travers, daughter of the formidable Lady Moire Travers. Morganthe secretly has a son by Random – now an enterprising thirteen year old who leads the local scouts with somewhat scary efficiency. He’s generally called Brinkers – and has recently become the ward of Corwin’s son, Reggie.

**Vialle Peters**

An American heiress and niece to Lady Moire Travers. Recently married to Random (much to the Earl’s relief).

**Moire Travers**

Proprietor of the weekly newspaper for women Milady's Boudoir, she is married to Tom Travers, mother of Morganthe Travers and Bonzo Travers, and used to employ the supremely gifted French chef Anatole – who Lady Flora stole from her.

Moire and Tom Travers make their residence at Brinkley Court outside Market Snodsbury in Worcestershire. They were married "the year Bluebottle won the Cambridgeshire". Moire is Tom's second wife.

Aunt Moire is "built rather on the lines of Mae West", but with a greenish-purple complexion. Her most notable personal characteristic is her carrying voice. Riding in her youth for years with such fox-hunting clubs as the Quorn and the Pytchley, she tends to address Bertie, over the phone or indoors, as if "shouting across ploughed fields in a high wind." She is also a keen wild swimmer.

She is also a Governor of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, for which she has the formidable task to find speakers for prize-giving day.

Milady's Boudoir is a fictional weekly newspaper for women, of which Aunt Moire is the proprietor. It is probably based on The Lady (Britain's oldest weekly women's magazine. Milady's Boudoir (and not "Madame's Nightshirt", as Tom Travers insists on calling it) never sold well and only stayed in business because of the reluctant largesse of Moire's husband.

**Claude "Mustard" Pott**

Double-chinned Mr Pott, "a stout, round, bald, pursy little man of about fifty", is a private detective and former Silver Ring bookie, an old friend of Bleys, 5th Earl of Ickenham (who provided the money to set up his detective business). In a long and varied career he also ran a club for a time, and was a minor Shakespearean actor; he has, in his time, been bitten by a pig (and a lamb). An incorrigible gambler and lover of soft marks, he is very skilled at the game known as Persian Monarchs (although not as quite good as Brand, the Duke of Dunstable), and can always deal himself an unbeatable hand at Slippery Joe. He lives at 6 Wilbraham Place, Sloane Square, with his fourth wife, Doris. “Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” (one of my favourite Wodehouse quotes – but Mr Potts is not, in fact, American).

**Also involved:**

In the past: Various boy scouts, younger Wolf Cubs and young scholars from the Market Snodsbury Grammar School, recruited by Ambrose Barimen, the Vicar, to mount an excited watch on the Greater Blue-Crested Treewarblers who – it is hoped - are nesting in the Great Wood. This is the Junior Branch of the ‘Market Blandings Wildlife and Countryside Conservation Society’, although locals tend to call its members ‘Magpies’ behind their backs, in homage to the colours of Ambrose’s robes and dog collar.