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

"I suppose not." She finished wiping clean the pewter bowls they'd used for their stew of rabbit and corn, and placed them neatly on the shelf above the hearth.

The pewter bowls had come from a gentlewoman in England. Lucas had moved away the veil that made her blind in her right eye. The literature on the subject went back to the great practitioners of the mystic East, but it was an operation so delicate -- only the very tip of the lancet could be used, and the amount of pressure applied was critical -- that three English surgeons had refused to attempt it. After he said he would, and did so successfully, Lucas was expelled from the Company on the grounds that he, a barber, possessed surgical instruments. If the woman had died, perhaps he would have been dealt with more leniently. Since she lived and thrived, the jealous surgeons hounded Lucas and Sally from London.

He watched Sally put away the pewter bowls. A penny to a pound the surgeons who made such grief for him still ate their suppers off wood.

Sally caught his smile and saw her chance. "Lucas, things are going well for us here, are they not? Your business is doing well?"

"They are and it is. And if you'd stop worrying about me so I could stop worrying about you, everything would be perfect."

"I'll try, Lucas. Meanwhile" -- she turned away, so she wouldn't have to look at him -- "I've been meaning to ask you..."

"What? Go ahead, Sal, ask."

"Since we're here and you have so much custom...Is there enough money to put some by for a dowry?"

It was something they'd talked about before they left Rotterdam. With a dowry, Sally might find a husband who was worthy of her. It was the only chance at marriage she'd have, since she wouldn't accept a man of the class they'd come from, and Lucas had sworn he wouldn't force one on her. "I've thought of it, Sal. But often as not I'm paid in wampum rather than guilders, and -- "

"Everyone uses wampum here. It's as good as money. I'm sure wampum would do for at least part of a dowry."

"Perhaps you're right. I'll do some asking, Sal. And keep my eyes open for someone who wouldn't mind -- " He broke off.

"Wouldn't mind what, Lucas?"

"That you're nearly twenty-four. And..."

"And not comely."

"I didn't say that."

"You may as well have."

"No. What I was going to say was 'Nearly twenty-four, and more clever than any man I'm likely to find in need of a wife here in Nieuw Amsterdam.'"


Three years earlier, during the typhoid epidemic of 1659, Stuyvesant had established a hospital for those who had not long to live. The worst of the town's whores and drunkards, most of them. Decent folk died in their homes. The hospital had five beds in which, at no cost and purely for the love of Almighty God, the undeserving indigent were allowed to die.

The good women of the town saw it as their duty to care for the dying, however unworthy. Anna Stuyvesant was frequently seen at the hospital. Occasionally the governor's wife also came. Judith Bayard (though a French Huguenot, she followed the Dutch custom of retaining her own name after marriage) was beautiful, but also a woman of strict rectitude. Even the dying were less likely to scream and curse when she was present. So, too, when the wife of the rector of the Dutch Reformed Church did some of the nursing. Sally Turner, on the other hand, inspired no awe. She got the full brunt of the patients' misery and discontent. Nonetheless, she appeared the most consistently of all the nursing women.

Nearly every day the juffrouw Turner and her basket could be seen walking along the narrow woodland path between her brother's plantage and the town, entering through the west gate in the sturdy wooden wall, hurrying along the wide Brede Wegh, skirting the small offshoot of the main canal known as Bever's Gracht, then crossing by the narrow bridge that led to Jews Lane.

Copyright © 2001 by MichaelA, Ltd.