THE LAST BEAUFORT

A family curse hangs over a young woman about to be married in New Orleans.

If Dru had her druthers, she and Giles would run off and quietly elope, but she knows how much a lavish society wedding means to Giles’s mother and grandmother. She endures the hoopla, knowing that her Paris honeymoon and life with Giles will be well worth any social anxiety. Besides, her real fear is how her own grandmother will behave when Dru takes Giles to meet her. What will he think of the eccentric, strong-willed woman who raised Dru, and from whom Dru ran away as soon as she was old enough to start a life of her own? Her grandmother wanted Dru to enter a convent rather than marry and risk falling victim to the Beaufort family curse: death during childbirth, a fate suffered by Dru’s mother. Though the meeting goes surprisingly well, Dru’s grandmother forces Giles to promise that he will not allow Dru to get pregnant. During the last days of the wedding preparations, Dru and a friend visit a psychic. When the fortune-teller attempts to look into Dru’s past, she senses great pain and encounters a dark energy that chases her away. Dru tries to put the spooky meeting out of her mind, and the wedding goes off without a hitch. During the honeymoon, however, Dru becomes pregnant, putting the curse to the test and eventually revealing the family secret it was meant to hide. Enochs executes the narrative admirably, adding imaginative twists and deftly layering intrigue upon intrigue. His rendering of old New Orleans high society is vividly spot-on throughout.

Dru’s haunted family secret evokes nostalgia for the New Orleans so recently lost.