The Academy of Our Lady of Light is the Catholic girls’ school and convent where Lizzy Enders is sent after her mother’s death and her father leaves her in Santa Fe. Attached to a chapel whose unfinished choir loft needs a staircase, the academy brings together the novel’s central conflicts: Lizzy’s Protestant isolation, the nuns’ religious discipline, everyday acts of care, and competing explanations for a carpenter’s remarkable work. It is at once a school, a place of refuge, and the setting where a local legend becomes an unsettled question of faith.

Institution and Setting

The Academy of Our Lady of Light belongs to a specifically Santa Fe world that is unfamiliar to Lizzy, who comes from Independence, Missouri. The novel presents her as a thirteen-year-old Methodist placed among Catholics in a neglected part of the American frontier. The academy’s religious life is not confined to lessons: its chapel, nuns, and communal observances structure the girls’ days and their expectations of what may be miraculous.

The author’s note connects this fictional setting to the historical Academy of Our Lady of Light, a girls’ school run by the Sisters of Loretto. According to that account, Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy brought the sisters from Kentucky to Santa Fe in 1852 to operate the school, which was attached to the Chapel of Loretto. The historical chapel’s choir loft presented the practical problem that drives the novel’s staircase story: a conventional stair would occupy too much space, while rebuilding the loft would be expensive; a ladder was another proposed solution.

Within the novel, the chapel is also a rare place of quiet for Lizzy. Evening prayers gradually become an oasis amid the confusion of school life. Incense, Latin, and the responses to prayer are initially unfamiliar, but the service gives her a peaceful interval in which to sort through her thoughts. It is also when she allows herself most directly to remember Mama. Her grief continues to surface during the day, but chapel becomes a regular setting for private reflection within the academy’s communal routine.

School Life, Discipline, and Care

The academy’s life includes both formal teaching and intimate, practical care. Sister Roberta teaches French, a class in which Lizzy is at a disadvantage because the other girls are ahead of her and speak the language easily. Lizzy’s first impression of the large nun is affectionate: beneath the severe black clothing and wimple, Sister Roberta’s jokes and twinkling eyes suggest a mischievousness that makes her approachable. Her classroom fish tanks, which she can lift with striking strength, further distinguish her from the girls’ teasing descriptions of her.

Sister Roberta’s compassion is expressed through small acts that quietly bend rules. She keeps Mrs. Lacey’s medicine in a basket beside a mug of coffee made sweet with milk and nutmeg, and explains that disobedience can be forgiven when it helps someone in need. The scene makes the academy’s religious life practical rather than purely ceremonial: care for a sick person can take precedence over obedience to an institution’s rules. For Lizzy, this kindness deepens into devotion to Sister Roberta.

The convent also becomes a place to which Lizzy wants Delvina brought after childbirth. Sister Roberta has told her that midwives in Santa Fe must be licensed by a municipal judge and certified by a parish priest as able to administer baptism. Lizzy worries that the baby could die before reaching the convent and be left unbaptized; the rules therefore register not as abstract regulations but as urgent concerns about a mother and infant in danger. The school’s religious authority, its access to care, and Lizzy’s own sense of responsibility meet in that fear.

The Chapel Staircase and Its Crisis

The missing staircase turns the chapel into the site of a prolonged test of expectation. The nuns conduct a novena to Saint Joseph and look to Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy for a solution, while the bishop acknowledges that he cannot perform miracles. When Lizzy brings a hungry, unemployed carpenter to his attention, the bishop agrees that the man should inspect the problem. The practical answer and the religious hope are thus entangled from the outset: the carpenter needs work, and the academy needs a staircase.

After the girls have been disappointed that Saint Joseph has not appeared, the carpenter returns and works inside the chapel at an exhausting pace. He begins at six in the morning, stops for mass, and continues late into the night, racing to finish by Christmas. Mother Magdalena orders the students not to disturb him. The academy’s daily routine adjusts around the work, while the girls’ curiosity and the nuns’ hopes remain concentrated on the chapel.

The finished staircase is a carefully made circular structure of thirty-three polished steps rising to the choir loft. Its beauty does not remove the immediate danger: it has no handrail. Sister Roberta tests it by descending backward on her hands and knees, then proposes that the girls practice coming down gracefully and show their faith. Mother Magdalena reads the carpenter’s disappearance and the completed staircase as proof that Saint Joseph came in the carpenter’s guise. Lizzy runs from the chapel rather than joining the nuns in prayer. She remembers the man as someone who had listened to her troubles, held her kitten, and spoken of his own family; her familiarity with him resists the congregation’s sudden transformation of him into a saint.

Legend, Belief, and Departure

The author’s note sets the novel’s episode beside the story associated with the Chapel of Loretto staircase. In the reported legend, a beggar carpenter arrives with a mule and three tools—a hammer, a T square, and a saw—builds a spiral staircase, and vanishes without collecting his pay. Accounts differ over whether the work took two weeks or months; the lumberyard men reportedly did not recognize the carpenter as someone who had obtained lumber on the bishop’s account. The novel reshapes this tradition as a school’s lived experience, giving the girls and nuns different ways to interpret a mysterious disappearance.

Lizzy does not accept the nuns’ conclusion, but the narrative does not settle the question by simply declaring the carpenter ordinary. The author’s note explicitly leaves the reader to decide whether the builder was Saint Joseph, and connects that uncertainty to a small opening in Lizzy’s own skepticism: the blind kitten becomes able to see after the carpenter holds her. The academy therefore holds two explanations together—religious interpretation and the personal knowledge Lizzy has of a vulnerable, grieving man—without making either account erase the other.

Four months after the staircase is completed, Lizzy leaves the convent for Texas, taking Elena with her. Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy has arranged the journey, which includes Elena’s wet nurse and family, three wagons, and an armed escort supplied by Abeyta’s father. The academy has not resolved every question of belief for Lizzy; rather, her departure marks a change in what she can accept and undertake. As school, convent, chapel, and refuge, it has placed her among people whose care can act as a kind of miracle even when supernatural explanations remain uncertain.