Bruar's Rest

that.
    Helen insisted she take extra clothing for the journey and pushed a worn skirt and the black cardigan inside the doctor’s leather bag.
    Next day Father Flynn promised to write to Doctor Mackenzie to say she was going to find her Bruar. He wouldn’t allow her to walk to Thurso, although she insisted that her feet were faster than fat Clydesdales and a rickety wagon. Helen gave her a few shillings to add to what she’d had left over from her Kirriemor friend. All in all she’d enough money for the long train journey south.

     
    ‘Can you tell me where the “King’s land” is?’ she asked a ticket clerk on the station platform in Thurso.
    ‘London, I suppose’ he answered, smiling broadly, ‘where the great palaces are. He stays at Balmoral sometimes to do a bit of shooting, but most of the year he lives in London.’
    ‘London it is.’
    The priest saw her on board, and just before saying goodbye, put a piece of folded paper in her pocket. ‘A wee bit extra’, he said. He seemed happy for her, but had a word of warning. ‘Take care, and keep eyes in the back of your head.’

T EN

     
    T he train stopped many times, Inverness, Perth and Edinburgh, and by the time it reached Newcastle in the north of England it was full to bursting with passengers. Thankfully, twenty minutes break was allowed at the stops on the way for long-distance passengers to stretch their legs and have some tea in a small station café. Everything seemed to run on a smooth track. She marvelled at the changing countryside. Newcastle frightened her, though. She told a ticket collector that a city of such magnitude must have brought a million masons to build it. When he said the place was begun as a port and grew from there, she said ‘the sailors were handy with a trowel, then.’
    The ever-changing landscape had captivated her, and she was so wrapped in thought about her journey that she failed to see the man with the torn raincoat who’d been watching and following her. It was when coming from the station café to catch yet another connection on her journey to the south that she saw him, but failed to realise, until too late, what his interest was—the leather bag she held tightly in her hand!
    ‘Madam, you’ve dropped this,’ he said with a voice as polished as a duke, holding a lovely red scarf.
    Never had she seen a bonny one like that before, and had it been winter she would have taken it and run. But she’d no need for a scarf in summer, so politely told the stranger he was mistaken.
    ‘No, I saw it fall from your shoulders, and thought how much it complemented your black hair.’
    It may be said that a gift horse with a big mouth should not be ignored, and this certainly was a gift, but why?
    ‘Look, dear thing,’ he pushed it into her hands, ‘one doesn’t tell lies.’
    ‘Well, one certainly is mistaken,’ she thought, taking it from him with a broad thank-you smile.
    ‘Better put it away or else it will get lost again,’ he said, pointing at her hold-all.
    Innocently she put the bag on a slatted wooden bench and folded the scarf. Then in a flash, at the precise moment a guard shouted, ‘All aboard for York,’ the stranger had the case in one hand, red scarf in the other; running down the platform, he was soon gone from her astonished sight. Smoke from the trains puffed and poured over the platform, in and around the scurrying legs and bodies of passengers, concealing the thief.
    ‘That pig-face has taken all I possess, even, heaven forbid, my ticket to London! Curse the hide off you for that,’ she screamed after the thief, who had disappeared from view like a wily fox. One or two faces turned to her, but only for a second—they were unmoved by her predicament. A war had not long finished and poverty in abundance had followed in its wake. One more incident was neither here nor there. Making her way through the bodies to complain to a bald, bespectacled man at the ticket barrier, she wished that the rogue would be half way to hell by now. ‘Excuse me please, missus, can I go in front of you? I have to get on that train.’
    The lady in question tutted at Megan’s apparent ignorance of ticket line etiquette and pushed her back into the queue. Slowly the London train’s wheels began to chug, chug, chug, and to her horror it started gathering speed.
    Pushing her way once again to the front of the line, she shouted, ‘I can’t stand here until you yap any more hair off him.’ Such was her