Three Gold Coins

by Josephine Moon

  ‘It’s so quiet,’ she observed. ‘I thought I’d be able to hear them by now.’

  ‘They are too busy eating dinner,’ Matteo said. Then he reached out and took her hand again.

  She allowed Matteo to lead her down the hill to the largest dome shelter. They stopped at the six-foot metal farm gate and she squinted into the barn, but couldn’t make out much. The goats were obviously dark in colour, like Meg and Willow.

  With a clank and a rattle, the gate opened and they stepped into the yard, a fine layer of straw under their feet. Suddenly, a goat popped out from the barn and into the remaining daylight.

  ‘Oh, she’s so small,’ Lara breathed.

  ‘These are our baby girls,’ Matteo said. ‘Four m-m-months old.’

  The goat was half the size of Meg and Willow, but with the same deep chocolate colouring and straight horns that leaned backwards from the top of her head. A long stalk of hay stuck out of her mouth as she observed the visitors.

  It wasn’t long before another goat came. And another.

  ‘What is their breed?’ she asked.

  ‘Camosciata delle Alpi. Alpine goats.’

  ‘I might need you to write that one down.’

  Matteo squatted and held out his hand for a cheeky goat to nibble, a glint in her eyes, ears flicking.

  ‘The babies are very friendly and very interested to know who is here. Come inside.’ He rose to his feet and led her into the expanse of the shelter, where dozens of heads looked up from long metal troughs in order to study the visitors. Several came to Lara at once, their soft little noses investigating her hands and her clothes. She knelt down and one put her head into Lara’s lap and nosed around to find the buttons on her shirt to chew. More followed.

  Lara giggled and gently pushed them away. ‘Oh, you are so cute,’ she whispered to them, scratching their backs and marvelling at the way their upright tails wiggled to express pleasure.

  Matteo joined her, dropping down on his haunches, and a rush of babies mobbed him. His eyes lit up with joy. One climbed into his lap and he laughed, trying to push her off but not before she knocked him backwards to the ground. Taking advantage of his position, others nibbled his hair and clothes.

  Lara laughed too. ‘Clearly they love you. You’ve got your own goat groupies there.’

  Matteo gently fought them off, with some difficulty, and managed to pull himself up to sit cross-legged, just one persistent goat chewing the back of his shirt collar. Lara couldn’t imagine a more delightful explanation for why his shirts always had holes in them.

  Around them, many goats stood in the troughs to eat, their back feet on the ground and their front feet inside. Some clambered over their sisters, getting stuck halfway with their long legs dangling at awkward angles. A few even slept in the trough.

  ‘Messy eaters,’ she said.

  ‘Very,’ Matteo agreed, but his eyes shone and he wore an amused smile as he watched them gambol about, chuckling as one suddenly sprang straight up into the air, launching itself on all four feet.

  ‘Where are their mothers?’ she asked.

  ‘They are in their own shelter.’ He pointed. ‘We take them off their mothers at six weeks and they all come here to live together until they’re old enough to have their own babies.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘Now. The men live over there.’ He pointed through the wall of the shelter in a different direction. ‘There are only two boys. They get fed all year, then spend a month in with the girls when it’s time. They have just finished their month of duty. They are very tired now and happy for a rest.’

  ‘Gosh.’ She dropped her gaze to the kid that had knelt down next to her, all the better to reach her clothing seams and buttons. ‘Are these ones quite young for that?’ she asked, rather embarrassed.

  ‘Birthing season is in spring,’ Matteo said. ‘They should be pregnant now, and they will be about a year old when they have babies.’ He pulled himself to his feet.

  Lara nodded and also stood up, brushing the dirt and hay and hair from her clothes.

  ‘Do you want to come and see the cheese factory?’ Matteo asked.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  Lara had imagined a romantic, traditional kitchen setting for the cheesemaking business. But this was all so clinical. White walls and floors that smelled of bleach. Stainless-steel benches that gleamed from energetic scrubbing. Hair snoods, plastic gloves, antibacterial soap, rubber boots. Huge plastic buckets that, while not as enormous as a true factory’s would be, still suggested mass production. And of course, it would be. This was a business like any other and it was a business that needed a licence to sell food and would have hygiene standards to adhere to.

  Still, it was disappointing.

  ‘Everything is finished for the day,’ Matteo said. ‘We make cheese straight after milking in the morning.’

  ‘Wow, so it’s really fresh when you make it.’

  ‘Straight f-fr-from the goat,’ he said, and smiled.

  Matteo opened the heavy door of an industrial fridge and the light inside blinked on to reveal dozens of rows of metal racks with hundreds of plastic squares of setting cheeses.

  ‘These we made this morning,’ he said. ‘They are a fresh cheese and will be ready to sell in four or five days’ time. It’s easier to make money with fresh cheese, as you turn over the product more quickly. Aged cheese has to be stored for so long. Goat milk is perfect for fresh cheese.’

  ‘Where do you sell the cheese?’ Lara asked, peering at the rows of white squares floating in a translucent liquid, lined up like parked cars.

  ‘At markets. The Santo Spirito market in Florence is the biggest. The second Sunday of every month.’

  He turned off the lights and locked the production room door.

  Outside, a few early stars had appeared in the sky, which was deepening into indigo above them. A light breeze carried the smell of something sweet and floral on the air and washed away Lara’s disappointment with the sterility of the cheese room, instantly lifting her heart.

  She was in Tuscany. And the man beside her had reached for her hand yet again. Any questions she might have had about whether it had been just a friendly move vanished.

  She followed him silently, considering her hand in his. It fitted nicely, their fingers slotting together for a snug, natural embrace, without any kind of whoops, let’s try it this way awkwardness. And despite what she’d been through in the past, a seed of hope sprang to life.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Matteo said.

  His hut sat on the other side of a copse of trees. It was perfectly positioned for a view over all three of the goat shelters—the mothers’, the kids’, and the males’. It was a dark wooden hut—probably some kind of kit home, she guessed—with a tin roof and two steps leading to a tiny porch. A yellow light shone next to the door. Matteo wiped his boots on the mat and levered each one off with the toe of the opposite foot. Lara went to do the same.

  ‘No need,’ Matteo said. ‘Mine are work boots, yours are…’ he considered her floral-printed sandshoes, ‘too pretty to leave outside.’

  The front door slid open on wooden tracks and she followed him into a cosy space, painted white, with a queen-sized bed dominating half the cabin to the right of the entrance, and a kitchenette and dining table on the left. A wall separated off the bathroom at the other end. A skylight over the bed showcased the darkening sky above them.

  ‘This is really lovely,’ she said, surprised. She’d imagined him living a bit more rustically on the farm.

  ‘It is part of my wages for my job,’ he said. ‘I get the best cabin as I am head shepherd.’

  ‘Shepherd?’ She wasn’t sure he had the right word. Didn’t shepherds move flocks of animals around and watch over them at night, wearing long robes and holding staffs in their hands?

  He frowned, mumbling some Italian words, trying to find a better translation. ‘A pastore. A goat manager. I look after their health, choose a diet plan, help w
ith milking and the babies and study what they’re eating and how it changes the milk that is turning to cheese.’

  Lara nodded, gazing around the space, at the books on his shelf—she couldn’t understand the titles, but they looked quite technical. She loved his bright red, orange and gold bedspread, and a chain of carved wooden birds that flew in a line above his bed, attached to the wall on each side.

  ‘Un caffè?’ Matteo asked, rubbing the back of his neck as though he’d had a long, hard day.

  ‘It might be a bit late for me,’ she said, not wanting to be awake and wrestling with her thoughts in the middle of the night.

  He went to the kitchen sink to wash his hands and she followed to do the same, washing off the last of the goat love. Matteo passed her a towel to dry her hands.

  ‘Maybe a vino then?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I could have one, I suppose, if I wait a bit before driving home again.’

  ‘No rush,’ Matteo said, reaching up above the sink to a narrow cupboard and pulling out two extra-large glasses, placing them on the dining table. She suspected they’d hold half a bottle of wine each.

  She sat at the table in a simple wooden chair with a tartan cushion, and Matteo began to whistle as he took a bottle of red wine from the shelf. It didn’t have a label.

  ‘Do you make your wine?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, as if this was the most natural thing to do.

  ‘Are there grapevines here too?’ She turned around to look out the box window behind her, trying to peer through the velvety darkness.

  ‘Just a dozen rows.’

  ‘How do you make it?’ she asked, watching him twist the corkscrew into the cork, watching the muscles in his forearm flex with each turn.

  ‘It is very easy,’ he said, shaking his head in a way that suggested he thought it would be crazy to ever buy it. He put down the bottle, the better to gesticulate. ‘We make it in one day. We pick the grapes and squash them with a special mallet.’ He mimed squashing grapes. ‘It must have air to breathe. After you squash it, it begins to boil, because there is yeast in the skin that reacts with the liquid inside. You leave this squashed grape mix in the open barrel for ten days, then transfer it to a big glass barrel with a thin neck.’

  She nodded, enjoying following the passage of grapes to wine. It might seem easy to him, but to her it sounded quite miraculous.

  ‘We pour oil over the grapes to seal them from air. Then when you want to get the wine out, you suck out the oil with a siphon.’ More charades. ‘You don’t want any oil in the wine.’ Matteo pulled a face. ‘And there you have it. Vino!’ He picked up the bottle he was working on and pulled out the cork with a titillating thwuck.

  Lara salivated. He poured the wine; just as she’d suspected, half of the bottle went into each glass.

  She took a sip. Over the years her tolerance for alcohol had increased but she still treaded carefully. She let it sit in her mouth for a moment, gently swishing it, giving her tastebuds time to wake up. He watched her, his eyes alight, waiting for her response.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said.

  ‘No, no, it cannot be just good,’ he admonished. ‘Tell me more. What can you taste? How does it feel?’

  Lara laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll try again.’ A wine critic she was not.

  Matteo watched eagerly, waiting.

  ‘It’s, er, kind of…well, I want to say woody, but that’s not right, is it?’

  Matteo shrugged encouragingly. ‘Sì, yes, if that’s what you taste. What else?’ he enthused, rolling his hand in the air to signal to her to keep going.

  She took another sip. But before she could offer any more observations, her stomach spoke with a loud and long gurgle. She was ravenous. Matteo seemed unfazed by the late hour but she wasn’t used to having to wait hours after darkness to eat dinner.

  Matteo lifted one corner of his mouth in a smirk. ‘Are you hungry?’

  She swallowed quickly and put her hands on her abdomen. ‘Yes. Sorry. I normally eat dinner much earlier, sometimes at four-thirty in the afternoon, because the kids have come home from kindy—kindergarten, that is—and are starving. So they want a whole meal. We call that their first hobbit dinner.’

  He frowned, confused.

  ‘Did you see the Lord of the Rings movies?’ she asked.

  He nodded, his head tilted, obviously trying to remember what she was getting at.

  ‘At the beginning of the first movie, after the hobbits have left their village and are following Viggo Mortensen’s character…oh, what was his name?’

  ‘Aragorn.’

  ‘Yes! So they’re following Aragorn and one of the hobbits complains he’s hungry. When Aragorn counters that he has already had breakfast, the hobbit says something like, “But that was just the first breakfast!” and says that hobbits have several more breakfasts. Or something like that.’ She laughed, relaxing more with every moment they were together. ‘So anyway, that’s what Daisy and Hudson do. They have their first dinner in the afternoon and then they have another, smaller one later, normally right after they’ve cleaned their teeth.’

  ‘The second hobbit dinner,’ he said, catching on.

  ‘Exactly.’

  He watched her for a moment, smiling, studying her. Something ignited inside her; his gaze was like a physical caress.

  He rested his chin in the cup of his hand, elbow on the table, relaxed. ‘Your eyes light up when you talk about your niece and nephew. You are close to them.’

  Lara shifted in her seat, crossed one leg over the other and shrugged, feeling helpless before her feelings of love for those two kids. ‘Our little family is very close. I love them like they are my own.’

  ‘Would you like kids one day too?’

  There were so many different directions this conversation could go and she didn’t want to go in any of them. Instead, she deflected it back to Matteo.

  ‘You never know what life will hand you,’ she said, then quickly followed with, ‘Tell me about your family. In fact, what I’d most like to know is why no one other than you is talking to Samuel.’

  Matteo huffed and rubbed his nose.

  ‘He told me everyone believes he killed his wife. Is that true?’

  Matteo took a breath and nodded slowly. ‘Sì. It is true.’

  23

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Lara said, staring at Matteo and spreading her fingers wide on the tabletop for support. ‘Are you kidding me? Samuel killed his wife?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Matteo said. ‘I did not mean that. I mean that everyone thinks he killed her.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What happened?’

  Matteo took a deep breath and let it out slowly, accompanied by a small, anguished groan. He scratched at the back of his neck and then looked down at his shirt as if seeing it for the first time that day. He pinched the fabric and lifted it to his nose to sniff.

  Lara giggled.

  ‘It is a long story,’ he said, dropping his shirt. ‘I think I need to shower first.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He stood and waved a hand at the fridge. ‘There’s cheese and grissini, olives too. Sun-dried tomatoes, zucchini, prosciutto. Help yourself, per favore. I don’t want you to waste away on me.’ He smiled at her then, and held her gaze until she melted into a buzzing, light-filled puddle.

  ‘Okay. Take your time,’ she said, holding up her glass of wine.

  Matteo disappeared behind the sliding door and she heard the shower water running. Not long after that she heard him singing.

  She wandered around his tiny cabin, peeking in his cupboards (well, she had to look for a serving platter, didn’t she?) and marvelling at how little he had in material stuff. In years gone by, she would have expected to see stacks of CDs and a music station, a television, a DVD player, a computer station and a telephone at least. But now, she realised, all these could be reduced to a pocket-sized phone and a laptop. Even books could be sucked into the technology, though she w
as still a staunch fan of the paper book and was glad to see Matteo was too. There wasn’t much else on his bookshelves other than a small figurine of the Pietà, Michelangelo’s famous statue of Mother Mary and her son Jesus, just taken down from the cross. It was an artwork she suspected would break even the hardest of hearts.

  Samuel had Catholic artworks in the villa too. And in Rome, she’d seen a statue of the Virgin on almost every building corner, some with tiny gardens adorning her feet. Lara’s own family had no religion. Eliza had ditched her Protestant upbringing long ago, though she raised her two girls with at least a cultural appreciation of Christianity. Lara found herself loving how much this country loved Mary, the mother.

  Behind her, the water turned off and she heard the shower screen slide open. Matteo was still singing and she realised that she hadn’t heard him stutter the whole time he’d been crooning in the shower. In fact, she hadn’t heard him stutter at all since they left the goats.

  Or maybe he had but she’d simply stopped hearing it.

  She drained the rest of her wine, enjoying feeling her limbs go just a little bit numb, her medication and lack of food increasing the effects of the alcohol.

  ‘Did you find the food?’ Matteo called from behind the door.

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ Lara called back, rushing to the fridge and placing the goodies from inside on the bench. She pulled a large blue platter from under the sink. The bathroom door slid open with a whoosh and Lara turned to see Matteo, hair dripping, wearing nothing but a white towel around his hips, bright in contrast to his olive skin. His chest hair was wet too and a line of it trailed downwards to his belly button.

  He grinned at her and it felt like a challenge.

  She held her gaze steady. ‘I’ve nearly got everything ready.’

  ‘Molto bene,’ he said, coming over. He plucked an olive from its jar and popped it in his mouth. The scent of soap rose from his steaming body. He was so close to her that as he reached for a piece of prosciutto a drop of water fell from his bare shoulder and landed on her arm. She looked down at it, watching it run towards the ground.