“Let her go!” she shouted into the dark.

For a moment there was a horrible contest, the infirmarian stretched between the two of them.

Then the hand released, all at once, and there was the sound of feet retreating fast down a stone passage, and Soledad fell to her knees on the cell floor, gasping, fresh red marks blooming at her throat.

It was the bench that told Inmaculada, more than anything, who Amparo truly was.

In the space of a heartbeat, with a filthy hand reaching out of a hole in the wall of a cloistered convent at midnight, a person might be forgiven for freezing, or screaming, or fleeing.