Excerpt from City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As in the case of the barber shop, Stuyvesant had almost kept his word about their land assignment. The Turner homestead was small, what the Dutch called a plantage rather than a bouwerie, and it was beyond the Voorstadt, nearly a mile from the town, not far from the Collect Pond. But it took them twenty minutes to walk to Wall Street, not half a day. And, after a lifetime of being misfits and almost three years of wandering, here in the wilderness of Manhattan Lucas and Sally had a place of their own.

They planted before they built, and all that first summer they slept rough with a musket between them, though so far the natives they'd seen weren't hostile. "A little sullen and withdrawn," Sally said. "As if they needed a good purging, but harmless enough."

Lucas wasn't so sure. Even when their cabin was finished -- hewn timber walls and a thick roof thatched with reeds and grasses, as was permitted north of the wall -- he went every night to his bed with the musket loaded and at hand. People in the town told endless stories of women who'd been raped, children murdered, men tortured before they were killed, and years of work gone up in flames when a homestead was burned to the ground.

One good thing: the Dutch had never been greedy enough or stupid enough to sell guns to the tribes living closest to them. In the vicinity of Nieuw Amsterdam, superior weapons gave the Europeans an advantage, though they were outnumbered. In the far north, near Dutch Fort Orange, there was constant fighting with the marauding Catskill and Wawarsink tribes who had been armed by the French and the English, desperate to have the Indians take sides in their wars over colonial territory. It seemed an idiotic policy to Lucas. If you had to choose between trusting a savage or trusting your gun, the weapon won every time.

Sometimes, long after dark, when he heard the sounds of strange night birds calling to one another in the surrounding woods, he remembered the stories he'd heard about ritual fires where death came after hours of screaming agony, and about mutilation that began with the toes and moved slowly upward. Lying awake in the night, Lucas put his hand to his head and wondered whether a man was always dead before some savage peeled off his scalp. And whether Sally had heard as many stories of rape and torture as he had.

They were too busy to speak of such things. The earth around their cabin was black and rich. The first season, despite how late she was getting things in the ground, nearly all the seeds Sally brought with her sprouted and thrived. She planted local vegetables as well, the pumpkins and Indian corn the settlers had adopted as basic foods, and at Lucas's urging she gave over a large field at the edge of their cleared land to poppies. "I need enough laudanum, Sal, so I can perform any surgery I want and the patient will not run screaming from the knife."

"For the patient's sake, of course," Sally said.

"Of course."

"You're a liar, Lucas Turner. You want the people you're cutting to be all but senseless because that way, once you cut into them, you can take your time and study how they're made."

"Aye, there's some truth in that." Lucas spoke without looking up. It was October, five months after their arrival, and he was sitting by the fire in their cabin, using the light to write by. "Truth, but no harm."

"You're a barber, Lucas, not a surgeon. Only surgeons are permitted to perform an anatomy."

"You're contradicting yourself, Sal. It's not an anatomy if the patient is alive. Only if you cut open a corpse."

"Don't lecture me, Lucas. According to Company rules, you are not a surgeon. If they were to discover what you're doing, we -- "

"Are you entirely mad, girl? We're in Nieuw Netherland, not New England. And the Company is on the other side of the ocean. Do you think any English magistrate is going to live through eleven weeks on one of those hell ships just to come and see whether Lucas Turner is being a good boy?"

Copyright © 2001 by MichaelA, Ltd.