Emma Fielding reads Daphne Du Maurier's enduring and 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: Land's End. The Frenchman has been captured and is being held by Godolphin. Following his own advice that the more hazardous the plan, the more likely its success, Dona sets out to save him from the noose.

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 century; an age where a traveller in time 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