Emma Fielding reads Daphne Du Maurier's timeless 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: Behaving Badly. On an impulse Lady Dona St Columb, imperious, dare-devil and unhappy, has escaped to her husband's country seat, Navron House with her two small children. Chancing on a hidden creek below the house, she has stumbled on the very French pirate who has been upsetting her neighbours.

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 age, where a traveller might 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. And where a Frenchman, captain of a pirate vessel La Mouette, is terrorising the local aristocracy with his daring and bravado.

Reader Emma Fielding
Abridger Julian Wilkinson
Producer Di Speirs Show less