The Missioner
Victor Macheson arrives in the village of Thorpe-Hatton armed only with faith and an inconvenient conviction that its prosperous, pleasant residents are spiritually starving. He's right. The trouble is, they don't want to be saved. Wilhelmina, mistress of the great house, watches this young missioner with a mixture of contempt and fascination - she's boredom personified, a woman trapped in velvet and tedium, who recognizes in Macheson something she's spent years learning to forget. The village resents his meetings, his prayers, his insistence that comfort isn't the same as contentment. But what pisses them off most is that he seems content with nothing. Oppenheim paints a world where wanting more is the one unforgivable sin. The missioner versus the establishment isn't just a story about religion - it's about what happens when earnest conviction meets a society that's made peace with its own compromises.
