House of Baltazar

Twenty years ago, John Balthazar, a notable and brilliant Cambridge mathematician, left England abruptly as he found himself falling in love with a woman who was not his wife. No one hears from him for 20 years and it's assumed he's dead. He travels to China where he steeps himself in the culture and returns incognito 20 years later with his Chinese pupil, Quong Ho. They live in a remote farmhouse where he stays in blissful ignorance of the events of the First World War until a German zeppelin c