Inspirations: The Perilous Gard

Let's go back in time to the year... what was it, 1992? I was a fourth-grader in Mrs. Van Aken's FOCUS 3-- a combined fourth-and-fifth-grade class for the... academically-inclined. I loved every minute of it.

Mrs. Van Aken was an awesome teacher. The most memorable parts of that year were the theme lessons-- multi-discipline mini-curricula, each focusing on a different time period. My favorite, of course, was the medieval theme. We read Adam of the Road, The Door in the Wall and The Trumpeter of Krakow. We broke into teams, chose medieval names, and played a "simulation" game where we started off as serfs and had to work our way up to "lady" or "lord." I still remember marking off little squares of my graph-paper "garden" with beds of carrots or potatoes, which we had to "sell" for the best price we could get for them in order to move up. At the end, of the lesson, Mrs. Van Aken "knighted" us--  sword-taps to the shoulders, "in the name of God, St. George and St. Michael," and all the rest. It was the coolest learning experience ever.

There were other things to like about that year. There was a class play about the Amazon Rainforest. There was a long-term writing project in which we made our own bound storybooks. (I still have mine, a series of adventures about a pair of sisters who fight pollution. If you are lucky, I might share it with you some day.)

Anyway. The most tangible remnants of my time in Mrs. Van Aken's class are the books I got from the Hot Box.

As I mentioned, Mrs. V was a bibliophile-- and her reward system proved it. If you amassed a certain number of brownie points-- and oh, did I amass the brownie points-- you were given a choice of rewards. The one I always chose was to select a brand-new paperback book from a cardboard box Mrs. Van Aken called the Hot Box. (As I'm sitting here, the thought occurs to me that it might have been my third-grade teacher who did this... but I've always remembered it as Mrs. V, and anyway I'd rather write about her.)

There was good stuff in this box. They were all "young reader" titles of various levels-- many of them prize-winning. Some were more excellent than others, of course--The Fair-Weather Friends was pretty entertaining, but it couldn't come close to the haunting weirdness of The Snow Spider. (Holy crap, that's a trilogy? I can't believe I never knew that! Must... read... sequels... now...) Jacob Have I Loved was a good one that I didn't appreciate at the time; Lyddie was another.

My favorite Hot Box book of all time, however, was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard.

The Perilous Gard-- for the many, many people who've never heard of it-- is about a teenaged noblewoman named Katherine Sutton. She and her younger sister Alicia are ladies-in-waiting to then-Princess Elizabeth Tudor, who is kept in a cold, drafty castle with insufficient supplies of coal and blankets (in hopes of killing her off? I do not know my history on this point.) Alicia, who is none too bright, writes a critical letter to Queen Mary about the situation, and Kate is blamed. Branded a troublemaker, she is banished to the remote estate of Sir Geoffrey Heron, a man the Queen says she "can trust."

When she gets there, she finds the place alive with hints of the strange, and even the supernatural. The Perilous Gard, as Sir Geoffrey's house is called, is a grim and shadowed place, much like Sir Geoffrey himself. Villagers are terrified of a woman in green who haunts the local woods. Most strangely, a man living alone in a leper's hut proves to be Sir Geoffrey's own younger brother, Christopher Heron-- who says he lives there by choice.

One night, sticking her nose where it probably doesn't belong, Kate witnesses an ominous meeting between Christopher and a strange man, who offers him the chance to atone for past mistakes. She is caught spying, and-- to keep her from talking-- kidnapped. When the drugs wear off, she is far underground, in the halls of the "fairy folk." With other "human" women brought there for the purpose, she is put to work as a cleaning woman-- though she resists the drugs that keep them from living in constant terror of the crushing stone above them. Her bravery catches the eye of the Lady, the queen of the people beneath the hill, and she begins to be taught some of her captors' ways.

At the same time, she is befriending Christopher Heron, who has been locked away to prepare for his death. In the end... well, the ending of the story is based on SPOILER. That ballad and others are woven throughout the whole novel, giving it a nice medieval feel despite its Renaissance setting.

--Vague and continuing spoilers below.--

What has always kind of stuck with me about this story is that the heroine is effectively given the chance to become one of her captors-- to "turn herself into a fairy woman," in the words of one of the characters. At the climax, she has to take drastic and immediate action to turn herself off that path. However, in stories like this-- and it's an old convention-- I've always kind of rooted for the heroine to give in and become the enemy--because you know what? The enemy is cool.

In The Perilous Gard, the Fairy Folk are depicted as cold and heartless people-- but they are also beautiful, graceful, dignified and clever. There's a lot about them that I found enviable-- especially since I first read the book during the most awkward phase of my whole childhood. At the time, I was too tall, too scruffy, slightly bucktoothed and completely unsure of what to do with myself in social situations. (I have since grown into my teeth.) I would have killed to become one of the Fairy Folk. I always wondered what would have happened if Kate had given in and gone with them.

(I probably wasn't at the point to appreciate this properly at the time, but I think Pope was actually trying to make Kate particularly sympathetic to kids like me. Book-Kate, too, is tall and awkward (and ugly as "a stone wall," to boot.) Though highly intelligent, she has no idea what to say to people, and has trouble making friends. It's quite conceivable that such a character might have wished for beauty and grace as desperately as I did. Viewed that way, her choice to remain herself is even more impressive.)

Regardless of the intended message, this book had a deep and lasting effect on my psyche. I read it many, many times (and it would still be on my shelf at home if my sister hadn't kidnapped it). Other stories affect me the same way. In 2003 I watched Peter Pan, and was riveted by the scene where Captain Hook tempts Wendy to join his crew. I badly wanted her to give in, and even though I knew it would never happen, I was disappointed when she rejected his offer.

I think that my love for "fallen" fantasy heroines stems from the fact that fairy-tale heroines in general are so insipid. I read a lot of fairy tales when I was little-- the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, especially-- and was always disappointed by the girls. Fairy-tale men are expected to be clever and resourceful, spirited and tough-- even underhanded when they have to be. The women, on the other hand, are expected to be beautiful, patient and obedient-- not much good if you're looking for a role model you can relate to.

Anyway. I've listed The Perilous Gard as an inspiration for A SUNLESS COUNTRY for a number of reasons. The underground setting is an obvious one, of course. Pope does a great job with it. She makes a big deal of the characters' reaction to "the weight"-- the constant awareness of the millions of tons of earth and stone over their heads. I might give the book a reread just for that, because I don't think I'm dealing with that enough in my current draft. There's also the "hidden court," which I haven't gotten into yet but will start to play with soon. The most important connection, though, is probably the chance for the heroine to become one of the enemy.

The "goblins" of my story-- which are actually a multicultural, multiracial amalgam of all intelligent things that go bump in the night-- share the vampiric tendency of turning people into themselves. It's not a deliberate action, like a vampire's bite. It's just that if you stay around them long long enough, you start to think and act them-- and pretty soon there's no difference between you. I've been wanting a long time to see what would happen if a heroine gave in to the temptation to "fall"-- and so, in this book, we might get to find out.