‘Great. I’ll pick you and William up at noon, then.’
* * *
She was ready and waiting for him, and she’d dressed up a bit for the occasion in a pretty blue-and-white sundress, teamed with a pair of practical blue espadrilles. He drove into the hills, south of Palermo, through sun-dappled vineyards. Fields filled with different shades of brown, which he knew probably looked far more dramatic in her eyes. Vibrant greens, that he could only imagine.
‘It’s beautiful up here.’ She’d been twisting around in her seat, talking to William about the things he saw from the car window, but it seemed that his stock of questions was exhausted now, and she turned back towards Matteo.
‘This is where my family comes from. My grandfather used to run the winery, and now my uncle does. My cousins will take over when their time comes.’
‘You never thought you wanted to do something like this. Go into the family business?’
‘No. My grandfather didn’t like it much when my father decided he wanted to go to Rome and become an academic, but by the time I’d decided I wanted to be a doctor, he’d got a little more used to the idea.’
‘But he had another son.’
Matteo grinned. As usual, Rose had found the human heart in the situation. ‘Yeah. Things might have been a bit different if he’d had no one else to pass the vineyard on to.’
‘Not for you, though.’
‘No. Not for me. I love this place, but I don’t think anything could have stopped me from becoming a doctor.’
‘And this clinic we’re going to—it’s attached to the vineyard?’
‘It’s right at the edge of the vineyard, near the village. My uncle donated a piece of land he wasn’t using.’
‘So this really is your family’s project.’
‘It’s very much a joint effort. I’ve known Isabella Mori ever since I was at medical school, she was a visiting lecturer and always on the lookout for volunteers to help at the women’s clinic. When I got back to Sicily from England, she told me about her plans to expand her services to rural communities and I suggested that a general clinic, which was committed to a comprehensive range of women’s groups and services, might be the way to go. Things snowballed from there.’
‘And carried you with them?’ She grinned at him. It was gratifying that Rose clearly suspected that he’d been one of the driving forces behind the venture, and he didn’t need to spell it out.
‘I couldn’t resist interfering a bit.’
She laughed. ‘I bet you couldn’t.’
The car kicked into a lower gear as the road became steeper, and Rose’s restless curiosity moved on to the slopes around them. ‘I thought that vineyards would be on lower ground.’
‘The cooler air in the mountains is much better suited to growing vines. And the volcanic soil.’
‘We’re going to see a volcano?’ William had obviously caught the word.
‘No, darling.’ Rose twisted round in her seat. ‘It’s an extinct volcano. That means that it’s all covered over with rock and it hasn’t bubbled up for a very long time.’
‘Not since...last year?’ In William’s book, last year was a very long time.
‘Not for more than a thousand years.’ Rose paused to let the enormity of a thousand years sink in.
‘It’s not going to erupt today, then?’ William sounded a tad disappointed.
‘No, it isn’t. The place we’re going to see today is where they take all the grapes and make them into wine.’ Rose frowned. ‘These grapes?’
‘Yeah, these are the ones.’
‘The vines don’t look quite as I’d imagined them. Will they grow taller?’
‘These bush vines aren’t as high yielding, but they’re the traditional way of planting and they produce a much higher-quality wine.’ Matteo turned off the road towards his uncle’s house. This was going to be the trickiest part of the day.
‘We’ll park by the house and walk down to the clinic and I’ll show you around before everyone gets there. My uncle and aunt won’t forgive me if we don’t pop in to say hello, but we won’t stay long.’