"Not guilty," he said at once. "My ancestors are French, Spanish and Irish. If there are any British in that tree they're hidden in the closet with all the other skeletons. Now, come upstairs and eat."

His room consisted of a bed, a table, two chairs and shelves full of cookery books. In these shabby surroundings he gallantly pulled out a chair for her and served up the meal with as great a flourish as if they were in the Ritz dining room.

"What were you doing down there, anyway?" he wanted to know.

"I just wanted to look at the kitchens, to know what I'm aiming for."

"And what's that?"

"I'm not really a chambermaid," she confided. "I'm actually the world's greatest cook in disguise. Well, I will be, when I've finished learning. I'm going to be so great that one day the Ritz will beg me to return, to reign over its kitchen. And people will come from far and wide to taste my creations."

Luke was a good listener, and soon she'd told him everything, especially about her mother, her most precious memory.

"She was a fantastic cook. She'd have liked to be a chef, but she got married instead. Women did in those days," she said, speaking as though it was a distant age instead of twenty years ago. "And all my dad wanted was fish and chips, egg and chips, beans and chips."

"Chips? Oh, you mean French fries."

"I mean chips," she said firmly, trying to not respond to his grin. If she died for it she wouldn't let him tease a rise out of her. Well, not that easily, anyway.

"If she offered him anything imaginative he'd say, 'What's this muck?' and storm off to the pub. So she started teaching me how to cook properly. I think it was her only pleasure in life. We used to plan how I'd go to cookery college. She got an extra job so that she could save up to give me a start. But it was too much for her. We didn't know it then but she had something wrong with her heart. Mitral stenosis, the doctor said. It killed her."