The cottage was smaller than Ed had imagined. He had pictured something grander—not a manor, nothing so grand, but something with more rooms, more space, more of the architectural ambition that seemed to characterize the homes of famous mathematicians. But Bleakley House was a modest thing: a stone cottage at the end of a lane, with a garden that had once been well-tended and was now running wild, and a front door that stuck when you tried to open it. Ed had to put his shoulder to it before it ...