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This is the second of two episodes about Elizabethan scholar John D.

Last episode, Dee's predictions secured the favour of Queen Elizabeth,

but a scheme he backed to find the Northwest Passage ended in humiliation.

At the castle of Traybon in southern Bohemia,

a plume of thick, grey smoke rises from the roof of the gatehouse.

The year is 1586, and inside, an experiment is underway.

A glass vessel, shaped like an egg, sits atop a furnace.

A young man wearing a cowl hunches over it, feeding charcoal into the stack.

He's been doing this for weeks now at regular and frequent intervals.

In the time before thermometers, controlling temperature is a delicate art. This furnace and the glass

egg on top must remain at a constant.

At the other end of the room is an older man, John D, the famous mathematician.

John D is focusing intently on the glass vessel, quill scratching into parchment as he takes notes.

He's hoping to see a change in the mysterious white matter inside it.

No, he's willing it to change, to turn deep red, a sure sign that they're on the right path.

Their backer, the nobleman who owns Traybon Castle, needs results.

Dee himself has bet everything, his career, his standing, his home, on this venture,

and the cow-clad man hunched over the furnace. They've been iterating with all sorts of ingredients.

Salts, earth suspended in water, horse manure, menstrual blood.

Their objective, to bring forth a substance that has been sought for centuries, but seldom,

if ever, obtained.

...