The cells of the secret prisons stood wall to wall, and prisoners soon learned to open passages between them. Through a hole in the wall passed news from outside, comfort, prayers and advice about what to say and what to keep quiet before the judges.
One woman prisoner revealed through such a hole that she had hidden, in the clothes she was wearing, valuables worth more than three hundred pounds. All her property had been confiscated, she had been searched on arrival, and still she carried her family's fortune sewn into her clothing, right under the jailers' eyes.
For these people the hole was the last free space in Majorca. But it had one flaw: on the other side there was always someone who, sooner or later, would be questioned. Many of the words whispered between two cells ended up copied by a clerk, word for word, in records that can still be read today in Spain's National Historical Archive.
