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, has met her match at last.

Today: The Merry Fortune. In the teeth of a summer gale, the Frenchman is carrying out his most audacious act of piracy yet, seizing a merchant ship in front of her owner. Dona has played her part but can she reach the ship and will she win her wager with her pirate?

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 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.

Reader Emma Fielding
Abridger Julian Wilkinson
Producer Di Speirs Show less