Art Nouveau woman with flowers on forearm

You know the Hesper? Old Ellen Marr's barge, the one with the green cabin? Her father hauled grapes up from the Richmond walls in the autumn, and the girl rode with him, sitting on the baskets like a queen on a cart. A painter came aboard one wet October, a thin man called Sellick who said he'd been waiting his whole life for a face like hers. He sketched her in pencil on a board of cabin panelling, all fine lines and no shadow, a woman stood in a ring of ivy with her hair full of flowers. He promised to come back with his paints. He never came back.

So Ellen waited. Years later, when her father was dead and the Hesper was still tied up at the same bollard, she took the board down and sat with it through a whole winter. In the spring she bought her colours from the chandler on the towpath, pink for the dress, cream for the blossom, and when the leaves turned that October she went out with a jar and collected the orange ones that fell into the backwater. She painted the waves at the hem last, the flood line of every flood she'd ever lived through.

The board's still on the cabin wall. The pencil version was the first draft, and she always said it was the truer one, because you could see where the lines had been hopeful. Mind the step on your way out, love. It's getting dark, and the water keeps the colour in it longer than you'd think.