Astrid smiled and patted her cousin’s arm. “Just as the queen hath spoken.”

“Oh, get away,” Marta said.

“What’s the second reason you remember the year?” Emil asked.

“It was right around the time my sister and I were deciding to make a go of it in America,” Marta said. “The idea of leaving home and being on our own across the Atlantic scared me stiff, but I thought to myself, Well, if little Astrid can leave home and sail across the ocean to Brazil, I can do the same. Maybe she’s scared stiff, too. I’ll write her, and we can be brave together.”

“Thus started the great correspondence.” Astrid glanced at Kennet. He was living for those little looks she kept flicking his way. “Which outlasted the utopia.”

“Trouble in paradise?” Johnny said.

“Almost immediately.” Astrid told how coffee crops had depleted the soil of the land the Finns bought. They managed to craft and cultivate a network of small vegetable gardens, but nothing near what it would take to make the community self-sufficient.

“At which point, some Finns left,” Astrid said.

“All the way back home?” Emil asked.

“Some did. Others went to Rio or São Paolo. My mother wanted to go back to Europe but my father had fallen in love with the land and was determined to make something of this little colony. I don’t think she ever forgave him.” She looked quickly around the table. “You mustn’t tell her I said that.”

“She’s coming here?” Trudy asked.

“Yes. In three weeks. So no tattling.”

“Fish never tell tales out of school, my dear,” Major said.

“I can vouch,” Johnny said. “You need a secret kept or a body buried, you call the Fiskares.”

Astrid said the Finns who resettled in Rio and São Paolo told their story to locals. Brazilians became interested in Penedo—the little piece of Finland transported to South America. They started coming to see the colony on weekends.

“My father was the first to open a boarding house,” Astrid said. “And of course he put in a sauna.”

“What’s a sauna?” Little asked.

“It’s a little room, or sometimes an outbuilding. It gets heated up with hot rocks and steam and you sit in there. It’s like taking a dry bath.”

“You just sit in there and be hot?”

She nodded. “You sweat out all your troubles. Finns are mad for them. A Finnish house wouldn’t have a sauna any more than it wouldn’t have a roof. Anyway, turns out all the posh Brazilians were mad for them, too. Soon they were coming up to Penedo in droves, like it was a spa resort. They’d spend a weekend immersing themselves in Finnish culture and taking saunas.”

“Gee whiz.”