Emma Fielding reads Daphne Du Maurier's enduring and adored classic - a story of love, daring and a painted pirate ship in a secret Cornish creek, and of the beautiful, roistering Lady Dona St Columb, who, fleeing her vacuous life in London in search of her better self, meets her match at last.

Today: La Mouette On an impulse Lady Dona St Columb, imperious, dare-devil and unhappy, has fled the playhouse and the pranks of her London life to escape to her husband's country seat, Navron House. Arriving with her two small children and a maid, she found it staffed only by the mysterious William. And while she savours her new found freedom, has someone been sleeping in her bed, and even smoking tobacco there and just who will come to call?

Set on Du Maurier's beloved South Cornwall coast, in the secret creeks and inlets of the Helford river, where the curlews wade on the mud flats and the night jars churr at midnight, Frenchman's Creek is a song to an age where a traveller in time might just glimpse a figure in the shadows, the moonlight glinting on his buckled shoe or the cutlass in his hand, and a cloaked woman might slip silently through the woods to meet her lover.

Reader Emma Fielding
Abridger Julian Wilkinson
Producer Di Speirs Show less