Elinora and Lizzy visit Dolores la Penca

Elinora and Lizzy visit Dolores la Penca during a secret nighttime excursion from the convent, ostensibly to ask about Elinora’s future. The encounter brings together Elinora’s uncertain religious vocation, Lizzy’s longing to know whether her father will return, and Dolores’s reputation for healing and foretelling. Its immediate revelation is withheld from Lizzy; its practical consequence is not. Outside Dolores’s house, Lizzy finds the mysterious old man she has been thinking about, and soon brings him to the convent as a possible carpenter for its unfinished chapel staircase.

The Secret Excursion

Lizzy Enders is surprised that Elinora St. Clair, whom she regards as an unlikely rule-breaker and an even more unlikely companion, asks her to come along on a nighttime adventure. Elinora has planned their departure for the eighth night of a novena. After the boarding girls have had cocoa in the kitchen and gone upstairs, the two slip out while the nuns are praying in the chapel. Their route is deliberately simple: they leave through an unlocked kitchen door. A lantern lights the way, and moccasins soften their footsteps.

The plan depends on Ramona’s cooperation, but not on her knowing the real destination. Elinora has promised to ask her uncle for a new cast-iron stove because the existing one smokes and burns Ramona’s baking. In return, Ramona helps arrange the girls’ nighttime outings. For this one, Elinora says they are going to check on Doña Elenita, a friend of Mrs. Lacey’s whose baby has a fever. The story appeals to Ramona’s affection for Mrs. Lacey, and the girls are expected back within an hour. Ramona also sends food meant for the supposed visit: tortillas left over from supper and cooked dried chokecherries. The girls instead intend to offer it to Dolores la Penca.

Lizzy has reason to be curious about the destination. Another boarder, Consuello, has described the distinction between curanderas, regarded as good witches, and brujas, regarded as bad ones. Dolores is known as a healer who relieves suffering and illness, and as someone said to possess the power to predict the future. Elinora has researched Dolores and other witches in Santa Fe. Lizzy, for her part, hopes to ask whether she will ever hear from her father again.

Dolores’s House and Elinora’s Question

The journey takes the girls to Dolores’s home on Agua Fria Road on a bone-chilling November night. The streets seem unfamiliar to Lizzy after dark: the people’s clothing and bearing make the nocturnal city feel unlike the Santa Fe she knows by day. At the house, Elinora presents the food basket, which Dolores accepts as an offering, and then asks for the advice she has come to seek.

Elinora says she believes she has a calling and is sure she wants to become a nun. She asks Dolores to tell her whether that calling is real. Her question turns the visit from a general consultation into a private test of religious vocation. Lizzy is present, but the conversation she came to witness is not ultimately available to her.

As Elinora begins to speak, Lizzy’s attention strays to the old man she has recently encountered: a beggar who had asked for work and urged the girls to take care. She remembers his kindness and becomes preoccupied with the thought that he may be cold outside. She imagines taking him back to the convent, finding him a place in the barn, and giving food to his mule. The concern grows urgent in her mind. Then Elinora shakes her: Lizzy has fallen asleep, and the fire in the hearth has nearly gone out. Dolores bends over it, blows on it, and the fire flares back to life.

The Withheld Answer

Lizzy insists that it is late and that they must leave. Dolores leads the girls to the door and tells Elinora to be careful on the way home, adding that she should remember what Dolores has told her. She then blows on Elinora’s lantern, and its candle catches. The advice itself remains unknown to Lizzy: she has dozed through the exchange and cannot tell what Dolores said.

Outside, Lizzy interprets the gap in her knowledge as more than ordinary sleep. She becomes convinced that Dolores has put her under a spell so she could not hear the conversation. The visit has therefore denied Lizzy the chance to ask about her father as well as concealed Elinora’s answer. Feeling cheated, Lizzy is angry. When her eyes adjust to the darkness, she looks for the old man and his mule, and finds them waiting in the shadows.

From the Visit to the Staircase

The old man’s presence gives Lizzy’s concern an immediate consequence. She brings him back to the convent, where he is put in the barn, and later presents his lack of work and skill as a carpenter to Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy. The chapel needs a staircase, and Lizzy suggests that the hungry carpenter might be given the job. The Bishop calls the staircase a dilemma: the nuns have prayed a novena to Saint Joseph, and he has prayed too, but he cannot perform the miracles expected of him. He agrees that the carpenter should examine the problem, treating Lizzy’s practical proposal as a possible solution.

The girls’ nocturnal visit thus becomes a hinge between apparently separate concerns. Elinora seeks certainty about a calling; Lizzy seeks news of her father and, despite her anger at being excluded, responds to the needs of the old man she has remembered. Her act of bringing him to the convent helps set the staircase’s construction in motion. When the carpenter later completes it, the nuns interpret his work as evidence that he was Saint Joseph. Lizzy rejects that conclusion: she remembers a person who listened to her, held her kitten, and spoke of his own family, not a saint. The novel preserves the disagreement rather than resolving it. The visit to Dolores belongs to that same tension between supernatural explanation and ordinary human action: Lizzy believes she was magically prevented from hearing the truth, yet the outcome that matters most begins with her own choice to help someone waiting outside.