Elinora

Elinora is the Bishop’s niece and the convent school’s most conspicuous challenger to its rules: fervent about becoming a bride of Christ, yet secretly involved with Abeyta and prepared to run away with him. Through Lizzy Enders’s eyes she first appears as a provocative rival, but her certainty, ambition, and later gratitude make her more than a fixed antagonist. Her story turns on competing forms of faith and desire, and on the possibility that a former enemy can become a source of help.

Identity and Characterization

Lizzy remembers Elinora as a girl with a big nose and provoking ways, someone who could make the convent’s disputes feel personal. The novel’s author’s note calls her the introspective protagonist’s childhood nemesis: a rule-breaking rival who somehow keeps landing on her feet. That description captures the imbalance in their early relationship. Elinora seems able to act boldly and absorb the consequences, while Lizzy, recently bereaved and abandoned, watches her with resentment and uncertainty.

Elinora’s public religious persona is emphatic. She speaks of becoming a bride of Christ and urges the other girls to wait for a miracle from Saint Joseph. Yet this vocation is not the whole of her identity. She is also secretly meeting Abeyta, and she imagines leaving the convent at night to marry him. The contrast is not presented as a simple exposure of hypocrisy: Elinora herself treats religious calling and romantic attachment as genuine possibilities, even when they pull in opposite directions.

Faith, the Carpenter, and the Schoolgirls

The chapel’s missing staircase gives Elinora’s faith a concrete object and a public arena. The Bishop describes the staircase as a dilemma and permits a hungry carpenter to inspect it, while the convent’s prayers to Saint Joseph continue. Elinora interprets the carpenter’s presence not as practical help but as evidence of insufficient faith: if Saint Joseph is expected to come, she argues, employing another carpenter dishonors that expectation.

When the Bishop refuses to recognize her calling, Elinora connects that refusal to the troubles surrounding the school. She blames Lizzy for bringing Abeyta’s note to Mother Magdalena and for helping bring the carpenter to the convent; she also links the carpenter’s arrival with Delvina’s death. In her account, these events are signs that the place has been visited by divine anger, and the carpenter may have been sent by Satan. Her explanation turns grief and institutional disagreement into a single religious conflict, while making Lizzy its convenient target.

Elinora does not keep that conflict private. With the other girls murmuring agreement and offering support, she proposes a fast: they will take liquids but refuse food until the carpenter is removed. The plan gives her a way to challenge her uncle’s decision through collective action, and the girls’ support strengthens her resolve. The episode also shows her talent for converting a personal grievance into a cause that can organize the school community.

Abeyta and the Choice of a Vocation

Elinora’s romance with Abeyta exposes the private life behind her public declarations. Lizzy discovers that Elinora has slipped out while she was asleep, and learns of a note from a boy at the boys’ school arranging another meeting. Worried that Elinora is too young and that the secret affair would hurt the Bishop, Lizzy tells the carpenter she fears Elinora may run away. Elinora’s own family history gives the possibility an unsettling precedent: Lizzy recalls that Elinora’s mother ran away at sixteen.

Later, Elinora makes the tension explicit by setting out two possible futures. If Saint Joseph comes, she says, she will become a nun; if he does not, she will marry Abeyta. She intends to take the events of the coming week as a sign. The declaration shows both her decisiveness and her reliance on an answer beyond herself: rather than reconcile her desires in advance, she places the choice in the hands of a providential test. Saint Joseph does not come, but the evidence does not establish what Elinora ultimately does about Abeyta or the convent.

From Rivalry to Alliance

After Ramon Baca attacks the girls’ dormitory, Elinora appears at the table with her arm in a sling and publicly credits Lizzy with saving her life. She thanks Lizzy, who refuses the idea that a debt is owed and explains that she acted because Ramon wanted baby Elena. The exchange does not erase their earlier hostility, but it changes its terms: Elinora can acknowledge Lizzy’s courage, and Lizzy can distinguish her own reasons for helping from any wish to win Elinora’s approval.

Their renewed closeness becomes practical as well as emotional. Holding a broken piece of the Virgin Mary, Elinora considers asking Abeyta’s family to help find a home for Elena, whose orphaned situation has become urgent. Lizzy responds that she has another idea, and the two bring the matter to the Bishop. Elinora’s willingness to seek help through her romantic connection marks a different use of that relationship from her earlier plan to flee with Abeyta: now it may assist someone vulnerable.

The Staircase and Elinora’s Narrative Role

When the carpenter’s work is found complete, the girls and nuns gather in the church to look at the staircase. Its thirty-three polished steps rise to the choir loft without a banister. Sister Roberta treats the missing rail as a demand for faith and demonstrates a cautious way down, while Mother Magdalena declares that the carpenter was Saint Joseph. The scene brings Elinora’s expectation of a miracle into contact with an event that the convent interprets as its fulfillment.

The novel does not settle the carpenter’s identity as a supernatural fact. Lizzy does not believe he was Saint Joseph; she remembers him as a human being who spoke with her, held her kitten, and listened to her troubles. The author’s note likewise leaves the legend open to the reader. Elinora’s importance lies in how forcefully she inhabits the space between belief and evidence: she makes faith a motive for defiance, a test for her own future, and a cause capable of dividing or gathering the girls. Her later defense of Lizzy and concern for Elena complicate the rivalry, suggesting that her most consequential acts of belief may also be acts of human loyalty.