Emma Fielding reads Daphne Du Maurier's enduring and much loved 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 escape and her better self, meets her match at last.

Today: Unwelcome Arrivals. The Frenchman has carried out his most audacious act of piracy yet. Returning to Helford with Dona, the lovers plan more quiet pleasure in the creek, but their happiness is threatened.

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