"Hey, I'm a cook, too. I don't like burgers, either," she said.
"Then what made you think I would?"
"Well-you've got an American accent-"
He gave her a speaking look.
"Sorry, sorry!" she said hastily.
"I'm American, and it therefore follows that I have the taste buds of an ox and the refined sensibilities of a fence post," he said, sounding nettled.
"I'm sorry I spoke."
"You should be!" But he was grinning. "I thought prejudice against foreigners was outlawed in this country."
"It is, but Americans don't count as foreigners, despite the hideous things you do to our language."
She added provocatively, "After all, most of you are descended from us."
"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."
For a moment her pixie face was sad, but she recovered.
"Rough deal," Luke said sympathetically. And through the conventional words she could sense the real kindness.
"Yes. The next thing I knew, Dad got married again, and suddenly I had a stepmother called Clarice, who loathed me."
"Real Cinderella stuff."
"Well, to be fair, I returned the compliment with interest. She used to call me Philippa," she added with loathing. "It wasn't enough that I never had time to do my homework because she developed a headache whenever there was any dusting to be done, but she actually addressed me as Philippa."
"A hanging offense," Luke said gravely.
"Yeah!"
"Any wicked stepsisters?"
"One stepbrother. Harry. But he made enough mess for ten and expected me to be his slave.
"When I mentioned going to college, Clarice glared at me and said, 'Where do you think the money for that's coming from? You've got grand ideas, think you're better than everyone else.'
"I argued, though you'd think I'd have known better by then. I said most people went to college these days. She sniffed and said, 'Not Harry.' And I said that since Harry was a moron that didn't come as a surprise, and she said I was an insolent little cow, and I said-well, you get the drift."
He was chuckling. "I wish I'd been there to see it. I'll bet you're a heckuva fighter."
"I am," she said, stating the simple truth.
"What about your mom's savings?"
''Dad took them. I remember him looking at the bank passbook and saying, 'I knew the bitch was hiding money from me!' I think he spent most of it on a honeymoon with Clarice."
"Wasn't there anyone to stick up for you?"
"Frank, my mother's younger brother, had a go at Dad. But Dad just told him to mind his own business. What could he do? I stuck it until I left school, then I got out."
"Cheered on by the dreadful Clarice?"
"No, she was furious. She'd got it all planned for me to work in her brother's grocery store for slave wages, and go on doing all the housework." Pippa's eyes gleamed with mischief. "I told her where she could put that," she said, with such wicked relish that Luke laughed out loud.
"I'll bet you did!" he said admiringly.
"She said she'd never heard such disgraceful language. I told her she'd hear it again if she didn't get out of my way. She screamed at me while I was packing, down the stairs, through the front door and all the way to the bus station.
"She said I'd come to a bad end in London, and I'd be crawling back in a week. I told her I'd starve first. I got on the bus and watched Clarice getting smaller and smaller until she vanished from my life and I vanished from hers. I've kicked the dust of Encaster off my feet, and it's staying off."
"Encaster? Don't think I've heard of it."
"Nobody's heard of it except the people who live there, and most of them wish they hadn't. It's about thirty miles north of London, very small and very dreary."
"Didn't your dad want you home?"
"I called him at his work once to let him know I was all right. He told me to 'stop being an idiot' and come back, because Clarice was giving him a hard time about it. That was all he cared about. If he'd been just a little bit concerned about me I'd have told him where I was. But he wasn't. So I didn't. That was the last time I talked to him. I'm still in touch with Frank, but he and Dad aren't speaking. He won't give me away."
"So you came to seek your fortune in London? At sixteen? Good for you, kid! Did you find the streets paved with gold?"
"They will be, one day. I do cookery courses in the evenings, and when I've got some diplomas I'll get a job as a cook. Then I'll do more courses, get a better job, and so on, until the gourmets of the world are beating a path to my door."
"S'cuse me, ma'am, but it's my door they're going to beat a path to."
"Well, I expect there'll be room for both of us," she conceded generously.
"You mean the three of us, don't you?" he asked with a grin. "You, me and that colossal ego of yours. They'll have to build somewhere just to house it."
"And the rest! Everyone knows Americans can't cook."
"Can't-May you be forgiven! And since you come from the nation that eats French fries-"
"Chips!"
"-with everything, doesn't think food is properly cooked unless it's swimming in grease, and can't make decent coffee-"
"All right, all right, I give in." She threw up her hands in mock surrender, then pointed to her plate. "This is really delicious, I'll admit that."
"All my own invention. When I've got it perfect I'll present it to the head chef."
''Oh, great! Now I'm a guinea pig. If I don't drop dead after eating this you'll know it's safe to offer it to the Sultan of Thingy and the Duke of Whatsit?''
"Something like that," he admitted with a grin.
She saw him regarding her outfit and said, "Nice, huh?"
"Love it, and the purple thing you were wearing when I saw you the other day."
Pippa chuckled. "The head housekeeper nearly fainted. She couldn't get me out of it and into my uniform fast enough. But I don't like people to overlook me."
''No danger of that. How do you afford fashion and pay for classes, as well?''
"I make my own fashion from other people's rejects. The jeans came from a rummage sale, the boots had been reduced five times because the color frightened people the hat came from an Oxfam shop, and I knit the sweater from remnants.". He grinned, enchanted.