"Having failed as a businessman and a portraitist, Audubon in 1821 is just begining to formulate his grand design to draw all the birds of America. Artist and scientist, aristocrat and wayfaring outcast, he is ambitious, reckless, and naive. Such is his state of mind when visitors arrive from New Orleans: a scandal-ridden physician and anatomist named Emile Gautreaux and his stunning wife, Myra. When Myra collapses and dies, the distraught Gautreaux believe she has been murdered.

He asks the young tutor to sit with him through the long night, keeping watch over her body. The two men do not meet again for decades, until Audubon summons Gautreaux to his New York estate. The mystery of Myra's death has linked them inextricably over time, as each has harbored secrets and deceptions."--BOOK JACKET.