Newly orphaned Peggy Grahame is caught off-guard when she first arrives at her family's ancestral estate. Her eccentric uncle Enos drives away her only new acquaintance, Pat, a handsome British scholar, then leaves Peggy to fend for herself. But she is not alone. The house is full of mysteries and ghosts. Soon Peggy becomes involved with the spirits of her own Colonial ancestors and witnesses the unfolding of a centuries-old romance against a backdrop of spies and intrigue and of battles plotted and foiled.

In 1558, while exiled by Queen Mary Tudor to a remote castle known as Perilous Gard, young Kate Sutton becomes involved in a series of mysterious events that lead her to an underground world peopled by Fairy Folk—whose customs are even older than the Druids’ and include human sacrifice.About the AuthorRichard J. Cuffari is a contributor for Houghton Mifflin Company titles including: 'The Perilous Gard'Elizabeth Marie Pope (1917-1992) was an author specializing in Elizabethan England and the works of John Milton and William Shakespeare.Elizabeth Marie Pope was born on May 1, 1917 in Washington, D.C., to Christopher Herman Pope and Florence Anna Thompson Pope. In 1940, she received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, and went on to Johns Hopkins University, where she took her Ph.D. in 1944. She taught English as a professor at Mills College for thirty-eight years before retiring on June 30, 1982. She was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism.Elaine B. Johnson, in her book Contextual Teaching and Learning, fondly describes her memories of studying Shakespeare and Milton with Dr. Pope (pages 50-51). Johnson recalls a teacher who was courteous, humorous, compassionate, lively, and excellent at drawing connections between her students' lives and the moral lessons of Shakespeare and Milton. Johnson also includes the comment that Dr. Pope was "weighed down by a heavy brace on one leg" and was white-haired, indicating that she took courses from Dr. Pope toward the end of her tenure as professor. For Johnson, Dr. Pope was not only an engaging lecturer, but facilitated class discussion with open-ended questions and interest in her students' comments.Her Newbery Honor-winning novel for young adults, The Perilous Gard, is an imaginative retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin set in the latter days of Queen Mary I of England and the early days of Queen Elizabeth I, featuring a strong, independent, clever young heroine, Kate. It also sympathetically discusses remnants of ancient pagan Britain driven into hiding by the coming of Christianity. Many of its themes will be familiar from the Arthurian legends, which are referred to at the opening of the novel.