Perceptive, intelligent, stubborn and wilful, Clara is the only daughter of a Midlands manufacturer, still bereaved by the death of her mother, and jilted by a local aristocrat. When she meets a visiting missionary, Richard Haslam, she falls in love. Haslam is an innately good man: unlike many of his Christian brethren. After much wrangling with her father, Clara marries Robert and agrees to join him in Africa. Her journey is both terrible and awe-inspiring, and once she arrives at the village where Robert lives, she finds an enclave of huts, dust and flies. Slowly, Clara finds out more about Robert, that he has been married before, and more disturbingly, that the Church must come first. When tribal warfare overspills into the camp, Clara is rescued by the Cavalry, and finds herself embarking on a painful and heart-wrenching discovery.
