Emma Fielding reads Daphne Du Maurier's much loved classic - a story of romance, 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: High Stakes at Dinner. The aristocracy are gathered, determined to flush out their piratical nemesis, not knowing his ship is under repair in the creek. As they sit for dinner at Navron House before hoping to surprise him, Dona must buy time and entertain as never before.

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.

Reader Emma Fielding
Abridger Julian Wilkinson
Producer Di Speirs Show less