Janie’s crush, friend, and fellow adventurer is Benjamin. She first sees him during lunch on her first day at St. Beden’s. He refuses to participate in a bomb drill, choosing not to get under his table as all the other students do. Janie says, “His eyes were serious and intent, and his hair didn’t flop limply over his eyes like so many of the boys’ hair did, but [left] his face exposed and defiant” (25). He’s different from others, as he is brave and knowledgeable in ways they aren’t. His descriptions of the bombs that fell during the war terrify Janie, but she’s “moved by his defiance” and willingness to accept the consequences of his rebellion (27). Initially, Benjamin doesn’t want to be an apothecary, like his father, though he describes a son taking over his father’s work as a distinctly English expectation. Instead, he wants to be a spy, and he’s Janie’s intellectual equal, initially tailing her and later inviting her to accompany him when they spy on Shiskin in the park.

Once Benjamin learns that his father is communicating with Shiskin and in danger of being taken, as Jin Lo was, he develops a deeper appreciation for his father and his profession. When he learns that his father has been turned into a pile of salt, he even becomes somewhat sentimental and contrite. After Burrows is restored to his human shape, Benjamin hugs his father fiercely, and Janie says, “[T]he apothecary looked surprised, then wrapped his arms around Benjamin, too. I remembered their argument in the shop, and how little Benjamin had wanted to be an apothecary, and I wondered if it had been a long time since they hugged like this” (199). As Benjamin’s opinion of his father shifts, so does his estimation of what is possible in his world. He initially rejects the apothecary’s suggestion to “allow” for all possibilities, suggesting that certain “physical laws” are simply immutable. For example, he argues that “the conservation of mass” must prevent people from turning into birds (107). By the end of the text, however, Benjamin is open to all the possibilities life offers; he even leaves London with his father to assist the apothecary indefinitely.

Burrows, Benjamin’s father, works with his alchemist colleagues, Jin Lo and Count Vilmos: They’re trying to make the world a safer place by finding ways to minimize the danger posed by 20th-century bombs. After the devastation that bombs caused during World War II—and the death of his wife, which resulted from this kind of weapon—he made this his mission. As an apothecary, he’s interested in helping people stay healthy, and the Pharmacopoeia has been in the Burrows family for over 700 years, suggesting that he comes from a long line of apothecaries. He hopes that his son, Benjamin, will follow in his professional footsteps and adopt his moral principles. However, until the first part of the text, the boy has been reticent at best, finding his father’s work “boring” compared to the work of, say, an international spy.

Burrows’s motivation—to make the world a safer place, especially for the powerless—is easy to understand. He’s a somewhat dynamic character, insisting early on that he doesn’t need the children’s help, especially on the Kong Olaf, but by the end of the novel, he seems to consider his son’s help indispensable. Rather than making arrangements for Benjamin to stay with the Scotts, for example, Burrows decides to take his son with him to help in his fight against corrupt, fear-mongering governments, which thematically supports The Intelligence of Children and their myriad abilities. He has long wanted to introduce Benjamin to the reality of his work as an apothecary and secret agent, and he’s deeply touched by Benjamin’s revaluation of their relationship and his profession.

A Latin teacher at St. Beden’s school, Mr. Danby is initially not under suspicion of being a double agent because of what he experienced during World War II. Not only was he a Royal Air Force pilot, but he was also a prisoner of war. However, he’s secretly disloyal to England and instead loyal to the Soviet Union. Years earlier, he studied in Russia and fell in love with the country based on his reading of the Leo Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina. Later, during the war, he met Russian soldiers and recalls that “even starving and imprisoned, those Russian chaps were certain, in such a pure, strong way, that their country would be a great power after the war […] [He] admired them terribly. They were like the ardent young men in Tolstoy” (253). Shiskin assures Danby that he has fallen in love with a false national narrative, a Russia that doesn’t really exist. Danby allowed the novels he loved to carry him away, believing that they depicted reality.

He chooses to be disloyal to England, which he says is full of “halfhearted, ambivalent, reticent, English” people (253). In addition, Danby suggests that if England gains the knowledge and technology that Burrows and his friends are developing, they’ll “hand it over to the Americans, who will then have everything—both the power to destroy the world […] and the power to stop all other countries from protecting themselves” (253). For this reason, Danby is a foil for Marcus Burrows. Burrows wants to ensure that no country has the nuclear capability to make other governments cower in fear. Danby, instead, wants to ensure that only the Soviets have this power, despite what they did to Shiskin and Shiskin’s “samovar” brother.