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separate earpiece called an écouteur so I could eavesdrop on the conversation. All I could do was watch Franck’s face as he listened to the realtor. It lit up within a few seconds and stayed lit.
    After he hung up, he grabbed my hands and led me in an impromptu little two-step until he whacked his head on the beam that ran across the low ceiling of the cellier . “ Merde !” he rubbed his forehead but nothing could wipe off his smile.
    “What did the realtor say? What’s it like?” I pressed.
    “It sounds incroyable ! The property is huge and goes all the way down to the vineyards and there are actually two separate houses on it.”
    “How much are they asking?” I asked.
    “Three hundred and twenty thousand francs. ”
    He watched my expression while I engaged in a series of quick mental calculations. Three hundred and twenty thousand francs - that was about $100,000 Canadian. From Franck’s description of the property, it sounded like a downright steal. Of course, that didn’t change the fact that it was still a fortune for Franck and me; we had no real source of income between the two of us. We had forty thousand for a down payment though, which would make the mortgage quite small…
    I should have been terrified about our ability to pay the monthly mortgage payments, but somehow I just wasn’t. Compared to the dark phantoms flitting in and out of my mind over the past two years, dealing with concrete dollars and cents, or francs in this case, was a relief.
    Besides, my conviction that we could make this work one way or another was still there. I wasn’t ready to call it faith yet, and I had no idea why my confidence manifested itself in French real estate rather than in God, but there it was.

 
    Chapter 4
     
     
    We visited the property in Marey-les-Fussey the next morning. The realtor was driving in from Châlon-sur-Saone, about half an hour south and the only free slot he could give us was eleven o’clock. Right away would have suited us much better, but we reminded ourselves that it wouldn’t do to appear desperate.
    We walked to Marey-les-Fussey, only a leisurely ten minute stroll through the vineyards from Villers-la-Faye; we arrived a half hour early. We had driven by the sprawling property about a dozen times the day before so we knew exactly where we were headed.
    I crossed the street to walk right up to the front gate of the property. It looked deserted. The agent had told Franck that the sellers, two elderly sisters, had already moved into a nursing home. The red tiled roofs and the old stone well in the courtyard seemed to be calling me. Franck grabbed my arm and yanked me back into the shadows on the other side of the street.
    “Everyone in the village will be watching,” he hissed. I surveyed the empty cobblestone thoroughfare. A vineyard tractor rumbled in the distance but that was the only sign of human life. “In here!” Franck ducked under the thick stone walls of the village washing house and pulled me in behind him.
    “What’s wrong with just walking around the yard of the house?” I asked, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dark. “Nobody’s there.” It wasn’t like Franck, or any other French person for that matter, to be so rule-abiding.
    “We mustn’t be seen,” he answered in a whisper. “Or overheard.”
    There was a little round window looking out to the street. I stood on my tiptoes and peered out. Still no sign of life except a few chickens clucking around a grassy patch two houses down.
    “There’s nobody out there, unless you’re worried the chickens are spying on us.”
    “Trust me. They’re there even if you can’t see them.”
    “Who?”
    “The villagers. They’ll be watching us. That’s how it is in ces villages .”
    Franck was always full of tales of the mysterious workings of ces villages , or “these villages”, but I remained sceptical. I looked out of the window again. It was just past ten thirty but the day was already so hot that