New York City, the winter of 1887.

A Madison Avenue drawing room.

Gas jets turned low, heavy curtains drawn, a blank canvas on an easel,

a half circle of upholstered chairs, and in one of them a grieving widower worth millions.

Luther R. Marsh was 76 years old, once a law partner of Daniel Webster's, and missing

his wife the way an elderly man misses his wife. Not keenly, every day, but constantly,

like a weight he had learned to carry. He had taken up with the spiritualists

the way men of his era and temperament often did. He believed. He wanted to believe. And tonight,

in his own parlor, he was about to see the spirits of Raphael and Rembrandt paint on command.

The medium was Anne O'Delia Dis Debar, broad-shouldered, dark-eyed,

robed in something that suggested either the Orient or a stage costume trunk, depending on the

witness. She stepped to the easel. She laid her hand over the blank canvas. She murmured.

She stepped back. When she stepped back a second time,

the canvas was no longer blank. A head was emerging from it, slow and spectral. The features filling

in before Marsh's eyes, a bearded old master, a woman with ringlets, a cherub, whatever Marsh had asked

for, whichever dead soul he'd hoped to see, whichever

dead painter the medium had promised him in the sitting arranged the week before.

Marsh wept, Marsh thanked her, Marsh eventually deeded her his house. She had been born in

Kentucky, probably in 1849, probably to a Jewish family named Salomon, probably as Ann O'Delia,

though even her name is in dispute because the woman had arranged her whole life for it to be.

By her late teens, she had left the family, left the state, and walked into the American spiritualist scene wearing a new one. Editha Lola Gilbert,

Editha Lola Montez, and, by implication, whispered in the right parlors, the illegitimate daughter of

...