Melaynie's Masquerade

What's a girl going to do when she wants adventure in her life, and men have all the fun? Melaynie Morgan is an independent-minded young woman in Plymouth, England, but it's the sixteenth century, and women are expected to dress elaborately and attend to womanly duties. Forget about doublets, swords, and sailing ships.

Melaynie refuses to let her conventional background deter her. She disguises herself as a captain's boy and signs on with privateer Francis Drake to plunder Spanish treasure in the exotic Caribbean. In the chess game of Renaissance politics, it's an undeclared war of opposing religions, but Queen Elizabeth's Protestant England and King Philip's Catholic Spain are maintaining a guarded peace. Into that mix comes Plymouth's Drake, waging his own private war with Spain.

Melaynie finds more than she bargained for during her year in the tropics serving Drake—from disease, death, and danger to a romance with a Spaniard and a friendship with an ex-slave. She returns to England, wiser but secretly pregnant. Her daughter Joan grows up unaware of her true parentage until the Spanish Armada brings a bittersweet and surprising reunion.