Page 5 of The Book of Irish Secrets (Magnolia Manor #5)

She looked at the top of the family tree and at all the names of the men and women who had founded the Fleury dynasty, amazed at the many children they had had.

It made Claire sad to read that a lot of the children had died soon after they were born as they succumbed to disease.

Such tragedies were recorded in the roughly drawn family tree and Claire wondered how her great-aunt had managed to get all the details of every single person who had lived and died at Magnolia Manor until today.

The first Fleury to live in Magnolia Manor was Charles, married to a Louisa Harrington.

They had had five children, two sons and three daughters, two of whom had died at a young age.

Louis, their eldest son, had married a girl called Kate O’Brien, the first Catholic Fleury wife, Claire assumed.

They had four children, all girls, and then the manor had been passed on to a first cousin called James Fleury, as girls couldn’t inherit such estates in those days.

And so it went on; the family tree had more and more branches, but it was always the eldest son, or a male cousin, who inherited as was the custom then.

By the time Claire got to the 1850s, her eyelids became heavy and she drifted off to sleep, dreaming of all the Fleury families living in the manor, their lives affected by the hard times and good, the manor steadily being added to and gardens laid out until it became one of the most important estates in that part of Dingle.

The shrill sound of her phone ringing woke Claire up an hour later. Startled out of her slumber, Claire grabbed her phone from the bedside table and said a hoarse, ‘Hello?’

‘Claire O’Hanlon?’ a woman’s voice asked.

‘Yes?’ Claire cleared her throat. ‘Speaking.’

‘This is Karina Flavin. Sorry to call so late but I was going through the emails from the applicants and found your letter. It was a little unusual, to say the least.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Claire started. ‘It was a spur of the moment thing. Sorry if it was a little strange.’

‘I liked it,’ Karina said. ‘It made me laugh, actually. And I want to see you as soon as possible. When can you come in for an interview?’

‘Whenever you want,’ Claire said. ‘I’ve just arrived in Dingle and I’m staying at Madigan’s B their fathers, Liam and Conor, were first cousins, whose fathers, Cornelius and Louis, were not only brothers, but twins.

Holy moly , Claire thought. So my great-granddad was Cornelius’s twin brother. How very interesting.

She already knew that Liam’s widow, Sylvia née O’Farrell, was the famous Sylvia who still lived in the manor, and Patricia, also called Tricia, was Fred’s widow and the mother of the ‘princesses’ in her imagination.

They all lived in the area, Tricia in the renovated gardener’s cottage, Lily and Rose in houses nearby and Vi, the youngest daughter, in the gate lodge.

Claire looked at the list of names again and noticed a little line under the names of the twins and something in faint writing.

She put on her reading glasses and brought the book to the lamp to see better but all she could decipher were the words ‘before the fight’.

That must mean that they had some kind of falling out – or a real, physical fight?

She knew it had to be more than a rift, something terrible to make the twins enemies forever.

How terrible and bitter it must have been. But when? And why?

Claire sighed and turned the page, feeling cheated.

She found that the next few pages had photos glued to thick cardboard, most of them too faded to make out what it was about.

But one of the photos caught her interest: that of two young men in morning coats and stiff collars, standing side by side.

Claire peered at the photo and discovered something that made her sit up.

This was even more exciting than she had thought.