These Several Hundred Years
by Wesley Doyle
Copyright© 2026 by Wesley Doyle
Romance Story: The scan arrives at 1200 dpi (sorry for the delay, cat was on the scanner), and under Ash's name Margot finds a second line the book called a smudge. He wants to see the stone. He can't fly, can't cross a border — a passport requires having been born. So Cora does the one thing she swore she never would: she lights the candle on purpose. Eleven seconds. Then a field in Northumberland, a ninety-year-old farmer, and four words that rewrite nine hundred years.
Colin sends the scan on a Tuesday, at 1200 dpi, with a note that says hope this helps! sorry for the delay, cat was on the scanner.
Margot has it on the table within four hours, printed at A3, along with a second sheet that is her own tracing of it, because she has spent two nights with a lightbox establishing which marks are the mark and which are the damage.
“There,” she says. “That’s it. That’s what’s actually cut into the stone, minus the clergyman’s flourishes, because he added flourishes, Cora, he could not help himself—”
“It’s a name,” Ash says.
“Yes. But it’s a name plus something, and the something is what I want you to look at, because it’s not decorative and it’s not damage, and Colin’s scan is good enough to show it and the 1878 plate isn’t.”
She slides the tracing across.
Beneath the mark, faint, there is a second line of cutting. Shorter. Made by the same hand.
“There’s another one,” I say.
“There’s another one,” says Margot. “It’s badly worn and I can’t read it and neither can the book, because the clergyman drew it as a smudge and captioned the whole thing a device of the lesser spirits, which — I’d like it noted — is the single laziest thing anyone in this story has done, and I include the man with the laser engraver.”
Ash hasn’t touched the tracing.
“I want to see it,” he says.
“The scan’s right—”
“The stone, Margot.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Here’s the problem, and it takes Priya about ninety seconds to lay it out, which is ninety seconds longer than it takes me to see it coming.
“He can’t go.”
“Priya—”
“Cora.” She’s gentle about it, which is how I know she’s certain. “He cannot board an aircraft. He cannot pass a border. He has no passport, and there is no version of a passport in his future, because a passport requires a birth certificate and a birth certificate requires having been born.” She spreads her hands. “He can’t get to England. There is no lawful route and there is no unlawful route either, because the unlawful routes all require documents too, they just require worse ones.”
The apartment is quiet.
“So we photograph it,” Margot says. “We go, we photograph it properly, we come back—”
“That’s fine,” says Ash.
“It’s not fine—”
“Margot, it’s fine.” He says it kindly. “I’ve wanted things I couldn’t have before. I’m nine hundred years old. It’s most of what I do.”
And I sit there at my own dining table and look at a man being gracious about the one thing he has ever asked for, and I hear myself say:
“There’s a way.”
Everyone looks at me.
“No,” says Ash.
“You don’t know what I’m going to—”
“I know exactly what you’re going to say,” he says, “and the answer is no.”
✦ ✦ ✦
We have the fight that night, after everyone’s gone, and it’s the worst one we’ve had, and it’s conducted almost entirely in low voices, which is somehow so much worse than shouting.
“You’d have to light it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You’d have to aim it.” He’s got both hands on the back of a chair. “Do you understand what that is? Every human being who has ever got me into a room lit that thing at me on purpose. Every single one. You’re the one person in nine hundred years who did it by accident and wanted nothing off me, and that is the single fact I hold on to at four in the morning in a stranger’s kitchen in Tualatin.” He shakes his head. “If you light it meaning to, you’re one of them.”
“I know.”
“I said it to you in a food court. You’ve said it back to me twice since. By accident. Never on purpose.”
“I know what I said.”
“Then why—”
“Because you want to stand on it,” I say.
He stops.
“You’ve wanted exactly one thing since I met you,” I tell him. “You didn’t want a job, not really, you wanted somewhere to be expected. You didn’t want a card, you wanted an address. You’ve never once asked me for anything, Ash, not one thing in eleven weeks, and last Thursday you stood at that window and said I’d like to go and stand on it, and I have been unable to think about anything else since.”
“It isn’t worth what it costs you.”
“That’s not your call.”
“It is entirely my—”
“No, it isn’t.” My voice does something. “You don’t get to decide what I’m allowed to spend. That’s the whole argument, that’s every argument we’ve ever had, that’s Hazel Dell and Peter’s kitchen and your four visits you didn’t mention. You keep trying to protect me by subtraction and I keep telling you it isn’t yours to subtract.”
He looks at me for a long time.
“Eleven seconds,” he says finally.
“What?”
“That’s how long it took at your mother’s. From the flame to me.” He rubs his face. “For eleven seconds you’d be a person who calls me on purpose. That’s what you’d be buying.”
“I’ve done the arithmetic,” I say. “I’d like to make the purchase.”
✦ ✦ ✦
We fly on the twelfth. Me, Margot, my mother.
Priya does not come, because somebody in this family has a job, and because she said, at the airport, in a voice I have not heard her use before, “Bring my fiancée back in one piece, she has a dress fitting.”
Ellen Delaney has not been on an airplane since 2011 and has opinions about all of it. Margot has made an itinerary. The itinerary is laminated. Nobody says anything about the lamination, which I think we can all agree is growth.
In Margot’s carry-on, in a hard case, wrapped in a tea towel, is candle two hundred and forty.
She kept one. Of course she kept one. Tab seven, last line, in silver Sharpie: MINE.
✦ ✦ ✦
Two things about the trip that I want in, because they’re true and because if I only put in the stone this will read like something it wasn’t.
The first is that he still gets called.
Twice while we’re in the air, which I only learn about later, and twice more while we’re in a rented Vauxhall on the A1, and once at four in the morning in a bed and breakfast outside Alnwick, where I wake at four-oh-six local time because my phone lights up with a text that says gone, back soon, it’s a woman in Salem and then, nine minutes later, back.
Eight time zones and it makes no difference at all. Of course it doesn’t. He isn’t traveling to them. He’s just where the wanting is.
The second is Colin.
Because Doncaster is, as Margot puts it, “basically on the way,” which it is not, and because my sister has been emailing a man with a cat for two weeks and has developed what I can only describe as a professional relationship.
He meets us in a parking lot. He is about sixty, in a fleece, and he brings the original brass master and a carrier bag with four other stamps in it.
“You’re the candle lady,” he says.
“I’m the candle lady.”
“You said on the email it caused a bit of bother.”
“A bit,” says Margot.
Colin nods slowly, in the manner of a man who has been on the internet long enough to stop asking follow-up questions.
“Well,” he says. “It’s delisted. And I’ve took the file off the machine, so there’s no more coming.” He hands her the bag. “You can have them, if you like. Only I’d not want to sell them now, would I.”
And Margot — who cried on my couch about organza bags, who has been carrying two hundred and forty candles on her back since June — takes a carrier bag of brass stamps from a redundant printer in a parking lot in South Yorkshire and says, “Thank you, Colin,” and shakes his hand with both of hers.
“Aye,” says Colin. “Right.”
Then he says, “It’s a name, in’t it.”
Everyone stops.
“I’ve looked at that mark eleven year,” he says. “You can tell. Decorative ones are all balanced, they’re drawn to be looked at. That one’s written.” He shrugs. “Whose is it, then?”
“A friend of ours,” says my mother.
Colin considers this.
“Well,” he says. “Tell him I’m sorry. I’d not have put a fella’s name on soap if I’d known.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The chapel is not a chapel. It’s the remains of one, in the corner of a field, forty minutes north of Alnwick down a road that Margot’s laminated itinerary calls a road and the Vauxhall calls a mistake.
Four walls to about shoulder height. No roof since — the woman with the key thinks the eighteenth century, but the woman with the key is ninety and cheerfully unreliable, and the key is for a gate two fields away.
Her name is Doreen. She farms with her son. She has never in her life met an American and is thrilled about all three of us.
“There’s stones,” she says, when Margot describes what we’re looking for. “In the floor, at the end. You’ll want to shift the grass off, it’s grown over shocking.”
“Doreen,” I say, “does anyone ever come and look at them?”
“Not since the university lot,” says Doreen. “That were 1994.”
✦ ✦ ✦
It takes us fifty minutes.
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