At the beginning of the novel, Ann is an awkward yet ambitious woman trying to carve a place for herself in the challenging and competitive world of academia. She deals with feelings of stagnation and grief over the loss of her father. As the narrative reveals much later, she is also struggling with her guilt over the role she played in her father’s death. She arrives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it is her only acceptance after a string of rejections from other programs and opportunities. Here, she encounters another rejection due to an administrative oversight. Patrick Roland and Rachel Mondray’s rescue of her ensures that she feels a sense of debt and loyalty toward them; they offer her a place to belong after everything else has been taken away.

At the Cloisters, Ann finds that her introversion and propensity for archaic subject matters work in her favor, rather than against her, for the first time. She begins to feel like the building itself is something greater than all of them. Initially, Ann doesn’t believe in supernatural elements or fate, and examines the Renaissance-era fascination with the occult through a purely academic lens.