Fortune's My Foe: A Romance

The narrative alternates between a naval campaign off a Caribbean port and domestic intrigue aboard ship and ashore, beginning with a woman in labor during a siege. It follows a fashionable young beau, an heiress whose clandestine marriage sparks rivalries, and other figures whose ambitions produce plots, counterplots, and quests for vengeance. Military assaults, colonial settlement episodes, and scenes of personal reckoning propel brisk action, while recurring themes of honor, ambition, fate, and the costs of scheming culminate in dramatic confrontations and revelations.