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

That was the only part of the walk Sally disliked. The Jews were fairly recent arrivals, a remnant from a settlement in Brazil. Stuyvesant was known to loathe them, but he'd been forced to let them in because there were Dutch Jews among the directors of the West India Company.

Just walking past the Jews' yellow brick houses below the mill made the back of Sally's neck prickle. All those stories of strange rituals involving the blood of Christian children...She could never get through the lane fast enough. Sally was glad to gather up her skirts for the passage through Coenties Alley, always slick with mud, toward the three-story stone building that stood at the water's edge.

Until the year before, the structure had been merely Nieuw Amsterdam's largest tavern and its only inn. When Stuyvesant needed somewhere big enough for all the townspeople to meet, he made it the Stadt Huys, the city hall, as well. Coenties Slip, leading to the town wharf, was in front of the Stadt Huys. Nearby were the town storehouses. Above them, in five workshops that had formerly been leased to the shipwrights, was the hospital.

There were two windows in the hospital. The dying stank, so the windows were kept open except in the worst of weather. While she went about her duties Sally could look out and see the short street called Hall Place, and the door to the butcher's house Lucas visited so frequently.

To buy the pig bladders and sheep intestines he needed in his craft, Sally told herself. That's why her brother was so often at the butcher's on Hall Place. And never mind that it was a ten-minute walk from Lucas's shop. After all, he came to the hospital a few times a week to see if anyone needed bleeding or surgery, so naturally --

"Juffrouw...Please, juffrouw..." A woman's voice. A few hours earlier, weeks before her time and squatting in the alley behind the Blue Dove alehouse on Pearl Street, she'd given birth to twins -- dead, and that was a blessing. One had no legs, the other a huge hole in the top of its head. The woman, a notorious whore, had been bleeding since the birth. Sally figured she'd be dead within the next hour or two.

"Please, juffrouw, can you give me something as stops the burning in my chest? Him over there" -- the woman nodded toward the man in the next bed, a drunk who the previous day had had the lower half of his body crushed by a falling barrel but refused to allow Lucas to saw off his legs -- "he says you can."

Sally reached into her basket for a salve of saxifrage and egg yolk, and made herself stop thinking about her brother's too-frequent visits to the butcher's on Hall Place.


"Good day to you, mevrouw." There was no one else in the shop. Lucas didn't have to keep the twinkle from his eye or the laughter from his voice.

"And to you, barber. I've something put by just for you. The intestines of a large cow. Come in the back and see."

Marit Graumann, wife of Ankel Jannssen, stepped from behind the wooden block. Her husband was one of the town's twelve "sworn butchers," permitted to slaughter cattle inside the wall. He paid the tax for a stall in the Broadway Shambles, the market across from the fort, and was required to be there every morning except Sunday. In the afternoon he was permitted to do business from his home. All well and good, except that after Marit gave him his dinner Ankel always stumbled off to bed in a drunken stupor. She herself had to hack apart the meats and poultry sold from the house on Hall Place.

A curtain of burlap separated the front from the rear of the shop. Marit pushed it aside and waited for Lucas. As soon as he brushed past her he felt himself get hard. She had a special smell. A woman smell. He'd had countless whores in London and Rotterdam, even a few here, but none had ever smelled like Marit. Neither did the women who came to him for treatment. They reeked of illness, often of filth. Mevrouw Marit Graumann smelled of flowers. And her lust had a dark and seductive fragrance of its own. Lucas had never before been with a woman who actually desired him. The experience was intoxicating.

Copyright © 2001 by MichaelA, Ltd.