As Jutta entered the ballroom the party guests quieted in overlapping waves, like wheat in a windblown field. The crowd had never seen anything quite like the tall black-clad vision that swept through the room.  She wore a midnight silk gown designed by her servant, Samira.  Venice was notorious across Europe and the Ottoman for its outrageous costume balls, populated by women who wore the most daring and even scandalous...

Jutta was overwhelmed with feelings she did not understand. She was breathing so fast she became light-headed.  She struggled her way down the ladder and then fled the library without thinking. Her silk robe was left crumpled on the wood floor of the mezzanine.  She raced through the hallways and up the stairs of the villa not realizing she was only in her Venetian heeled slippers. The crash of silver and china hitting li...

Jutta Meyer was an only child. Her mother died in childbirth and she was brought up in Amsterdam by her loving, doting father, Lukas. She was beautiful, precocious, and strong-willed from her earliest days, and Lukas indulged her in everything.  Not to say that she was spoiled, for she was hardworking, earnest, and unselfish as well.  But, where other girls of her time in Amsterdam would have been discouraged from indulgi...