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Dzerjinski. What’s more likely is that she was just curious.
    The people ‘Miss Fisher’ is in service with are a man and his wife and two children, and an old mother-in-law, but no more lodgers now Dzerjinski is gone. Fisher said her master had given her notice but ‘her mistress, Mrs Hyde’ had ‘taken that back as there was plenty for her to do’, minding the baby, cleaning the house and cooking for all of them.
    I began to wonder what all this was leading up to, if anything, but it turned out just to be her way of asking if she could have this Fisher for tea here in the kitchen on her afternoon off. I couldn’t help thinking how lucky she was to have found a friend while I knew no one, but I said I’d no objection, provided she didn’t neglect her own work and remembered it wouldn’t be long before I’m confined.
    It helps her with her English, having a friend who can’t speak anything else. ‘I’ll soon be chattering away better than you, ma’am,’ says she with a stupid grin and another blush.
    I sent her to bed and then I wrote all this down. The baby sits heavy and unmoving and I have the strange feeling, almost certainly nonsense, that her head is caught up in my ribs. It’s time she turned over. But at least I know what will happen next week or the week after when she begins her escape. I knew nothing when I was expecting Mogens, less than nothing. For one thing, I thought he would come out through my navel. I reasoned—not understanding about the afterbirth and how a baby feeds inside you—that the navel must have some use and what use could it have but to open and let the baby out? It was a great shock, I can tell you, when Mogens started coming out the other way. My mother told me Adam had no navel and, more to the point, neither did Eve. They weren’t born but made by God. But the strange thing was that I never made the connection.
    I’m tired and I’m going to bed.
    July 21st, 1905
    It has been insufferably hot and it’s like this all over Europe and America, according to the papers. (I make myself read the papers every day to help my English.) People are falling down dead from sunstroke in New York and here, which is more to the point, children have been poisoned by ice-cream. I have forbidden Hansine to buy any for the boys.
    A tremendous fuss is going on between England and Germany and Denmark and Sweden, all to do with who’s going to be the King of Norway, Prince Charles of Denmark or Bernadotte. Or I think so, I could follow it better in Danish. The Emperor William is involved, as might be expected.
    I’ve written a long letter to my husband which is why I haven’t felt like writing this diary for three days. I wrote pages and pages of what I think are called ‘home truths’, how horrible it is living here in this dreary street, how hostile everyone is with their stupid questions, the polar-bear woman Mrs Gibbons, for instance, and about the heat and my fear of war. It would be even worse for foreigners here if there was war with Denmark and Sweden was involved. How could he leave us here alone for months and months in a foreign country?
    I told him something else I read in the paper, that the Princess of Wales has had a son, born on July 13th. I am not so fortunate. I asked him if he’d forgotten I was expecting his child which may be born any day. Am I to bear it alone here? Suppose I die? Hundreds of women die in childbirth every day, though not Princesses of Wales. Hansine came back from fetching Mogens from school and told me of a woman who died this morning after her twins were born. She got it from another friend of hers, a very low class of person, a slum-dweller in those hovels off Wells Street. There are five other children, all under seven, and the father is sick and out of work. I screamed to her to be quiet, not to tell me these things, is she mad, has she no feelings? But I put the story in the letter to Rasmus. Let him hear it. Why should I bear it alone?