Emma Fielding reads Daphne Du Maurier's enduring and beloved classic - a story of romance, 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: Escape to Navron. On an impulse Lady Dona St Columb, imperious, dare-devil and unhappy, abandons 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 finds it staffed only by the mysterious William. And while the sun on her face promises the first taste of the freedom she seeks, stranger surprises await too.

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 another century; an age where a traveller in time might glimpse a figure in the shadows, the moonlight glinting on his buckled shoe or the cutlass in his hand, and a cloaked woman slip might slip silently through the woods to meet her lover.

Reader: Emma Fielding
Abridger: Julian Wilkinson
Producer: Di Speirs Show less