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: The Cabin Boy. The Frenchman has been quiet of late, preferring to be idle in the Creek, teaching Dona to fish and about the birds. But the time for action is drawing near and perhaps he will find he has need of a new crew member.

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 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 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