Stolen Lives

Prologue
Malaga, Spain, 1936

She left the Hospital Nobel in the pre-dawn light, walking along the mosaic pavement between beds of dead flowers, and closing the iron gate after one last look at the neo-Gothic edifice.
        She walked with a heavy step, her head hung low like a patient whose treatment had been painful and unsuccessful, trudging alone through the empty streets, past the desiccated botanical garden left to wrack and ruin. At each step, a sharp pain drilled through every fibre of her body, forcing her to pause on a bench while the pain receded. Then, refusing to succumb to the agony, she pushed herself upright and continued along the Paseo del Parque before the anguish and the fear overwhelmed her.
        At the corner of the Calle de Molina Lario, where the cathedral looms over the city, she felt the tension intensify within her. Seeing how little damage the convent had sustained gave her a glimmer of hope. Aware she was running out of time, she could not risk staying in the beleaguered city any longer and quickened her step. Dawn spread shafts of light between the buildings casting long forbidding shadows across her path. People were starting to rise and go about their daily business, and it was impossible to tell which side they were on. To avoid being seen, she crept silently close to the buildings.
        Reaching the convent in the morning twilight, She rested on the wrought iron railing to relieve the pain and summon her strength before mounting the steep steps to the large wooden doors. She pulled the bell rope, then pulled it again with more force, pounding the doors with her fist and shouting until someone came. When the little door within the much larger one creaked ajar, a nun appeared with her hands crossed piously across her chest. She denied knowing anything about the baby and no one at the convent would know anything, nor would anyone there be able to help her. With a sanctimonious tilt of her wimpled head, the nun directed her to the cemetery and delivered a fierce rebuke for disturbing the sisters at such an early hour, before retreating into the safety of the convent.
        She needed to gather all her strength, grasped the railing and with her arm across her midriff descended the steep steps with a hollow feeling in her chest. Approaching the cemetery, the sight of a forest of statues and obelisks adorned with sculptural reliefs of heavenly creatures commemorating the dead filled her with dread. She stopped at the gate and looked for a hidden corner where she might find unmarked graves. Seeing none, she combed every metre in the labyrinth of tombs and mausoleums feeling the first pangs of powerlessness. After the rise of the weak winter sun, a cemetery worker witnessed her desperation and came to her assistance informing her that no one from the convent had brought a dead baby to be interred. She felt an explosion of relief infused with grief and devastation at the same time.

She always believed in her heart that the baby girl she had delivered was alive and that the lifeblood that flowed between her and her baby would never be diluted, that one day she would be reunited with her bloodline.