The Last Croft

The notice had been fixed to the croft door with a single stubborn nail, the paper itself trembling where the wind found it and flung the moor’s brine-spray through the latch. It was not a thing anyone in the township expected to see nailed to their threshold, not when the croft had belonged to the MacTaggarts for as long as anyone could remember and not when Aileen had twenty years' memory of her father’s hand shaping peat and turf into neat stacks that burned slow and warm through every lean winter. She stood for a long time with her fingers still at the latch, feeling the rough grain of the wood as if she might find an old mark her father had cut into it and draw from that memory a guarantee that paper could not offer.

Duncan still slept under the eaves, a boy’s thin frame curled beneath coarse blankets. The fire in the hearth had the last embers clinging to them like tired beetles; the copper pan on the three-armed hook was cold from the night. Outside, a gull called and the sound rolled over the croft roofs like a question. The notice had been stamped with the laird’s crest; its language was plain and merciless: surrender of possession, immediate vacating when required, legal recourse by the factor. It spoke of ‘rearrangement of holdings’ and of the estate’s ‘improvement plans’ in a tone that had nothing human in it. Aileen folded the paper once and then twice, feeling the grain of the linen it was printed on beneath her palm, and the weight of the paper felt heavier than the bundle of hay she might carry to market.

People said a factor had been appointed some months ago, a man from the county town who kept account books and wrote to the laird in long, polite letters about balance and return. They said the laird was oversea and that there were debts that could not be met with croft rents and that some would be offered relocation, others removal. Aileen had heard these things as rumor, as the sort of talk that churned in the back of a woman’s mind while she stitched or churned butter — real enough to make one frown but not yet sharp enough to prick. This paper cut. It named reasons, figures, dates. It named a day.

She roused Duncan with the steadiness of someone used to giving orders and taking loads. He blinked at first, then read the corner where the crest showed through; his hands went cold. ‘We’ll not be driven off like trampled sheep,’ he said, not a question. Morag from across the way came at once, leaning on her stick and cursing softly under her breath. The old woman’s face was a map of seasons; she folded her hands around the paper and smoothed it with a patience that suggested she had read many such things in smaller towns, where men’s mouths were softer but their decisions were harder.

By the time the township gathered on the low rise that looked across to the sea, a raw smell of peat and kettle steam filled the thin air. The people came wrapped in cloaks patched in places and new in others; some carried infants, some came with children trailing behind. Reverend Hamish Reid arrived wearing his good coat though his hands were rough with gardening; he did not speak ill of the laird outright but his jaw was tight. They formed a loose circle and spoke in small, cautious voices until Morag beat her stick against a stone and asked plainly what the notice meant for the crofts nearest the road. ‘Everything and nothing,’ said the smith’s wife. ‘It says quit, it says rearrange. It means they wish to make room for sheep, they say.’

The words moved through the gathering like a tide. Aileen listened more than she spoke; in meetings of this kind the lazy cadence of panic often filled space where a plan ought to have been. Reverend Reid counselled calm and petition; Morag called for a handhold and to remember the old rights that the clan had once laid against the earth in oaths and songs. These were not courtly instruments, but they were not without currency in the minds of the township. People reached for what they had — memory, custom, prayer — while the paper nailed to Aileen’s door marked a new vocabulary they had to learn: indenture, deed, register, sheriff’s clerk. She felt the words like foreign coins in her palm.

When the talk turned to appeals and petitions, Aileen’s thought had already gone further: to the county town and to its stone halls where registers were kept like iron, aloof from peat smoke and hearth talk. If there was a place where a crofter might find a legal foothold, it would be there, in a bound book whose pages bore the names and seals of men who had translated custom into law. If there was an original tenancy indenture, if it had not been sold off or lost, it might yet stand between them and the road. The idea came to her not as hope but as an obligation; she would go and she would look. There was little she feared more than leaving Duncan, but she feared losing the croft more.

Dawn moved and the light grew sharper against the pebbled road. As the township dispersed with the slow, heavy resignation of those used to bad weather, Aileen tied her father’s spare cloak about her shoulders and set her jaw. She would go to the sheriff’s office. She would ask to see the register, and if she could not, she would find the man who kept it and sneeze on his conscience if she had to. There was a stubbornness in her that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with a name carved on a stone and the warmth of a hearth that had given the family its shape.