‘That won’t be easy… especially if it gets around that Father Salter got cold feet about doing it. The Catholic Church still believe that exorcism works, which is why they’ve opened up their exorcism classes. But they don’t want to be seen to be defeated by some evil spirit, especially if it gets out on social media. You can imagine some of the trolls they’d get.’
‘Francis, I don’t give a toss about the Pope’s public image. I want our son back, and Katharine here wants her husband back, and I’m sure you’re just as desperate to rescue Ada. Right now, that’s all that matters.’
‘I know, Rob, I know. Which is why I’m prepared to give it a go myself.’
‘You know how to carry out an exorcism?’
‘I know how to carry out a spiritual decontamination. I have the full text, which was first written down by a Jesuit priest called Raphael Hix. He was a real oddball and apart from being a priest he was a gleaner, like me – or a wizard, if you want to call me that. In the early eighteenth century he was paid by Baron Robert Petre to decontaminate Old Thorndon Hall, the Petre family seat in Essex.’
‘The Petres? Who were they?’
‘They were hereditary peers, the Petres of Writtle, in Essex. They’d always been staunch Roman Catholics. Twelve of the family were Jesuits and two of them were bishops. It was Bishop Francis Petre who decided to call in Raphael Hix, because he had tried to exorcise Old Thorndon Hall himself, but he had failed, and he didn’t want the Pope to find out that he had failed. As it was, the Pope did eventually find out, and because of that he refused to make him a cardinal.’
‘So what was it in this Old Thorndon Hall that needed to be exorcised?’ asked Rob.
‘It was a spirit that had plagued the Essex salt marshes for decades, known as the Lamper. It was rather like the Jack O’Lantern that was supposed to haunt the Suffolk marshes. If you were out walking or gathering oysters on the marshes, a dense sea fog could roll in quite unexpectedly and it was easy to find yourself lost. But after you’d been wandering about a bit you’d see this lamp waving in the distance, or what looked like a lamp, and you’d walk towards it, thinking that somebody was guiding you. The next morning your dead body would be found in a creek, naked and lacerated all over as if you had been whipped with barbed wire, with your eyes missing.’
‘Urghhh!’ said Portia, with a shudder. ‘Remind me not to go looking for oysters on the Essex marshes, won’t you?’
‘Oh, the Lamper doesn’t haunt the marshes any more, because Raphael took care of him – or her, or it, or whatever sex it was. Mind you, more than half the marshes have gone, too, because the sea’s washed them away.’
‘How did the Lamper get into Old Thorndon Hall?’ asked Vicky. ‘I mean, what was he doing there?’
‘Pretty much the same as the force that’s here in this house. Robert Petre and members of his family had been attacked time and time again by Protestants – physically as well as verbally. His wife had horse dung flung over her when she was stepping down from her carriage in Westminster, and gangs used to creep into the estate at night and smash all the downstairs windows.
‘Robert Petre had no doubt at all who was behind these attacks – the suffragan bishop of Bradwell, the Anglican diocese that borders the Catholic diocese of Brentwood. His name was Leonard Montague and according to several historical records he had an almost incandescent hatred of Catholics. Nobody quite knows why, but he made no secret of it. He called them the “Lice of Rome”.’
‘Charming,’ said Vicky.
‘Well, that’s exactly what Robert Petre did. He brought in a charmer like Ada, a witch whose name unfortunately we shall never know, and she created a witching room for him. She did that by luring the Lamper to the Thorndon estate with the promise of a safe dark hiding place in the wine cellar. From there he could come out at night, or whenever it was foggy, and roam around the local area, snatching any passers-by whose eyes he took a fancy to. He would also be free to drink as much of Baron Petre’s wine as he wanted.’
‘Now that my hangover’s gone, I think even I would be tempted by that,’ said Katharine. ‘The wine, not the eyes.’
Francis opened his folder again and showed them a seventeenth-century plan of Old Thorndon Hall. ‘The witching room was installed on the first floor here, right at the back, overlooking the three-hundred-acre park. Once it was ready, Robert Petre invited Bishop Montague to visit him, so that they could discuss some kind of a truce between them. He also hinted that he might donate a considerable amount of money to the Bradwell diocese, as a gesture of reconciliation.’
‘But he trapped him?’ asked Rob.
‘Exactly. He showed Bishop Montague around the house, ending up in the witching room, where the charmer was waiting for him. She recited the incantation that catalysed the Lamper’s force in the walls, and bam! there your bishop was, stuck for all eternity in that moment that he’d walked in there. Even if there was a God, not even He could have rescued him.’
‘But if Robert Petre’s problem with Bishop Montague had been sorted out, why did he want to have the place decontaminated?’
‘That wasn’t until three or four years later. The Lamper was growing restless. Local people avoided the estate like the plague because too many of them had been found dead with their eyes missing, so there were fewer victims for the Lamper to go after, and it had drunk most of Robert Petre’s wine. Its force started to appear around the house, with flickering
