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: Fowey Haven. La Mouette has left the creek and sails with a new prize in her Captain's sights. And aboard there is a new member of the crew, a Cabin Boy with ringlets to hide and rubies in her ears.

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 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. 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