A seventeenth-century Dutchman, he is a member of the Talamasca and an ancestor of the Mayfair witches. The story of his life is recorded in seventeen volumes of the Talamasca files (although it is condensed in the Files on the Mayfair Witches). Petyr narrates his relationship with the Mayfairs in long letters to his superiors at the Motherhouse, and his writing is reminiscent of actual correspondence from that period.
Petyr is tall, slender, and fair-haired, with an oval face. Orphaned at the age of eight when his father is burned at the stake, he comes into the Talamasca’s care and remains with them for the rest of his life. He is passionate, multilingual, loves art, and possesses psychometric skills and a limited power to read minds (which he distrusts). His nihilistic perspective inspires him to create some sense of meaning in his life, and he does this through his work for the Talamasca. Petyr believes that, had his father lived, he too would have become a surgeon. Yet he might also have been an artist, since he admires how artists create meaning through their work. In the Talamasca, Petyr studies with those members who travel throughout Europe in the guise of priests and Calvinists to try to save women condemned as witches. It is in this capacity that he first comes to know Donnelaith, Scotland.
Petyr is eighteen years old at the time, and the year is 1665. (Although 1659 if the year mentioned in LR, Petyr’s letters claim that he rescued Deborah twenty-five years before her execution in 1689, in 1665.) Using the disguise of a Calvinist scholar, he is too late to rescue Suzanne Mayfair from being burned at the stake but is able to persuade the townspeople to allow him to take Suzanne’s daughter, Deborah, with him, ostensibly to Switzerland, to raise her in a religious manner. She is only twelve, but Petyr falls under her spell, loving and desiring her. He wants to be with her, but her tastes and desires prove to be beyond his material means, such as when she sets her heart on an expensive emerald. She soon rejects him, along with the rest of the Talamasca, until just before she is to marry a French count. That night she seduces Petyr and he fathers Charlotte. She then begs Petyr to leave the Talamasca and join her, but he cannot. She goes on to France, where he loses track of her.
Years later, in 1689, he locates Deborah again in Moncleve, France, on the eve of her scheduled execution: she has been sentenced to be burned at the stake as a witch, like her mother, and he is unable to save her. Gaining admittance to her prison cell, Petyr listens as she tells him her story and asks for his assistance the following day. He obliges, deeply grieved, and she is able to choose her own form of death. After she dies, Petyr decides to follow Deborah’s daughter, Charlotte, to the West Indies. He believes she is his daughter and must be warned against the spirit Lasher, which brought both Deborah and Suzanne to their tragic fates. The Talamasca insists he return to Amsterdam, for they are afraid for his life, but he defies their threat of excommunication to do what he believes he must.
Charlotte invites Petyr to her grand plantation in Saint-Domingue. To his surprise, she knows that he is her father. He tries to warn her about Lasher, but Charlotte rejects his advice. She reveals that Lasher is already with her and that she is helping him to possess the body of her father-in-law. Petyr is horrified yet also deeply intrigued by Charlotte. She drugs him and imprisons him, during which time she repeatedly seduces him until she becomes pregnant.
After she releases him, Lasher plagues Petyr on the road and in his rooms in Port-au-Prince, luring him out, visiting in many frightening forms, pitching corpses at him, and driving him into the place he most fears – the local cemetery, where he dies. He is forty-three years old.
Charlotte later gives birth to twins, Jeanne Louise and Peter, who are Petyr’s children.
Petyr appears as a figure in Rowan Mayfair’s dream of being a surgeon in Leiden. He insists that she kill Lasher while he in a vulnerable human form rather than use her power and knowledge to bring him through into the physical world and assist his survival.
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