His plans of removing Nancy from the living (since she preferred being a pirate to marrying him(which wounded his manly pride deeply)),are disrupted by Minerva decapitating him. She and her friend, Minerva Sharpe, start a career as pirates, fleeing Nancy’s dear fiancé Bartolome and on the lookout for Nancy’s eternal love William, whose job might complicate the relationship: He’s a Navy officer pursuing pirates.Towards the end bad Bartholome ensnares Nancy by using the pregnant Minerva as his ship`s figurehead. Written in brilliant and sparkling first-person narrative, this is a wonderful novel in which Celia Rees has brought the past vividly and intimately to life.As the father of the 15-year old Nancy Kington, a Bristol merchant, dies, her brothers send her to their father’s Jamaican plantation, where she is to be married to the sinister Brazilian buccaneer Bartholome, who is (naturally) twice as old as she is. As pirates, they roam the seas, fight pitched battles against their foes and become embroiled in many a heart-quickening adventure. But fate ensures that one night the two young women have to save each other and run away to a life no less dangerous but certainly a lot more free. The second is a spirited and rebellious English girl, sent to the West Indies to marry well and combine the wealth of two respectable families.

The first is a slave, forced to work in a plantation mansion and subjected to terrible cruelty at the hands of the plantation manager. When two young women meet under extraordinary circumstances in the eighteenth- century West Indies, they are unified in their desire to escape their oppressive lives. But fate ensures that one night the two young women have to save each other and run.

Pirates by celia rees