'You can sit here.' A woman gestures to the pregnant lady and her companion holding an easel, drawing paper and a Reeves watercolour box as she shifts her handbag from the seat adjacent to her onto her lap. 'Three women can squeeze on a bench. My husband will take some time to return—he can stand.' She winks.

'I'm Rudolfine Oettinger, and this is my cousin Rosa,' the pregnant lady introduces herself and her companion after they are seated, enthused by the woman's cordiality. 'My husband will also take some time to come—he can stand too,' she quips. 'I'll paint a portrait of you if you're willing, in gratitude.'

'Senta van der Decken. I'm honoured, although I'd be more interested in watching you paint a panorama of Basel and the Rhine,' the woman reciprocates, inferring why Rudolfine is at the embankment this fine day near the end of July.

'You're Norwegian, though, aren't you?' Rosa, a damsel of about sixteen, bashfully enquires. 'Your accent…?'

Senta nods spiritedly at Rosa's recognition of her accent. 'I haven't been able to visit my father and nursemaid Mary since marriage, though. It's a pity—I'd like to thank him for understanding my taste better than I thought.'

Rosa answers Senta's unasked question, 'I have relatives in Christianssand.'

'I'm from Arendal1. Do you know where that is?' Senta asks, referring to a town sixty kilometres from Christianssand. Rosa nods in acknowledgement.

'I can paint both,' Rudolfine declares. 'The physician advised that I should be more active,' she discloses, gazing at her bulging belly.

'Painting is more fun than spinning,' Senta banters.

Rudolfine and Rosa laugh. 'Categorically!' Rudolfine concurs. 'What do you like to do?'

'Actually, I would like to be a dramaturge.'

Senta's avant-garde response induces Rudolfine to scrutinize her more closely as she prepares her paints with Rosa's assistance. Senta is in her thirties, Rudolfine estimates as she sketches her face. Her matching pearl and ruby on gold necklace, earrings, bracelet and brooch are iridescent and pigeon's blood red, but unostentatious and understated, the opposite of the practice of a lady of society.

Rudolfine has finished the portrait of Senta and has begun the panorama of Greater Basel's Rhine embankment, with historical half-timbered houses and the red sandstone Minster with its colourful roof tiles and twin towers, when a man with a boyish face and dark beard, dressed in a black doublet and petticoat breeches and wearing a pair of gold loop earrings approaches them, doffing his hat as he does so.

'Senta. With which ladies might I have the pleasure of being acquainted?' He bows to Rudolfine and Rosa.

Mynheer Van der Decken is surely a member of a historical society, Rudolfine considers with amusement as Senta makes introductions. To her surprise, he seems about a decade younger than Senta. Senta must have detected her curiosity, for she remarks, 'It's to make up for the years he waited for me.' She flashes a smile at the Dutchman, who beams in return.

Returning to the panorama, Rudolfine's attention is caught by a yacht with red sails and black masts anchored in the Rhine, which she meticulously paints so that it becomes the focus of the picture. 'I've never seen it before,' she comments.

'It's ours,' Senta divulges. 'He hadn't been home for so long that he just wanted to stay by the Zuyder Zee for eternity, but I convinced him to go on a voyage—he loved to explore the world, after all,' she teases the Dutchman. 'It's our wedding anniversary today,' she discloses.

'Felicitations!' Rudolfine and Rosa congratulate.

Another man nears the group. 'My husband, Ferdinand,' Rudolfine introduces. 'Mynheer and mevrouw Van der Decken.'

'It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Herr Oettinger,' the Dutchman declares, shaking his hand.

'Are you a mariner?' Ferdinand Oettinger speculates from the Dutchman's petticoat breeches, gold loop earrings—for seafarers, a symbol of having rounded Cape Horn—both ways—and gait.

'Aye.'

'Have you doubled the Cape of Good Hope? Been to the East Indies?' Ferdinand cannot halt his curiosity.

The Dutchman nods. 'I've doubled the Cape…in bitter gale and raging storm,' he recounts with an ironic smile. 'Gorged myself on so much nutmeg on the Banda Islands that the shareholders of the United East India Company would call me a wastrel; even attempted to woo a wife there.'

'I'm envious—you're far more well travelled than I,' Ferdinand remarks. 'I suppose you encountered pirates?'

The Dutchman fingers a gold ring on his hand engraved with a pike and a dragon. 'We terrified them so much that they would not assail us even with the Rhine gold2 beside us.' He grins.

Mynheer Van der Decken is an enigma, Rudolfine muses. He has quaint manners, yet tells fantastic anecdotes so smoothly that he could be a confidence man should he put his mind to it. I believe his recountings; nonetheless, he could tell tall tales and I'd bite hook, line and sinker. Well, I trust Senta's judgment. Moreover, there's something touching about mynheer Van der Decken marrying Senta, who appears considerably older than him.

Ferdinand's attention is drawn to the yacht which Rudolfine has finished painting. 'It reminds me of the Flying Dutchman,' he comments.

Rudolfine's eyebrows raise. 'It reminds me of a fairy tale novella3 I once read. The sails are scarlet, not blood-red, aren't they?' She looks first towards Rosa, who shrugs—the sky has reddened as the sun begins to set, affecting distinguishability—, then towards Senta and the Dutchman, who playfully refrain from responding.

Ferdinand does not contradict her, but intent on his train of thought, recollects, 'There was a Basel lad who ran away to sea and became the steersman on the Flying Dutchman. What was his name? Schorr? Scholl?' He endeavours to remember.

'Schott,' the Dutchman offers.

'That's it—Schott! So you've heard of his family's house—the one that receives a dead man's letters until this day. He had a fiancée who received a gold ring from Morocco—his promised gift to her—in the post every time her family arranged another match for her, so that the poor girl never managed to get married,' Ferdinand relates.

There is an amalgam of hilarity and solemnity in the Dutchman's eyes. Collecting himself, he opines, 'Didn't the missives cease about a hundred years ago? The Dutchman's crew, observing technology and fashion evolve and the date when they went ashore every seven years, doubtlessly realised after a hundred years that all their family had departed from this world and stopped writing letters. Also, surely they didn't keep returning to Morocco for gold rings?' He fingers the ring engraved with a pike and a dragon again. 'Besides, their homeland was the one land they could never find, so how would Schott know whether his fiancée was newly betrothed? He would have assumed after a couple of years that she was happily married and lamented his fate while continuing to sing songs dedicated to her. I'd surmise that Schott's fiancée was loath to be wedded to another and purported receiving yet another gold ring each time her family planned to marry her off. There is eternal fidelity on earth.'

'By golly, you make perfect sense!' Ferdinand exclaims. 'I always get taken in by old wives' tales, Satan take—' A glare from the Dutchman silences him. Oops, swore in front of ladies again. Though, one would think sea dogs accustomed to it, Ferdinand reflects before recalling the Dutchman's quaint manners.

To his surprise, the Dutchman only admonishes, 'Don't take the devil's name in vain.'

'Yes, I shouldn't set a bad example for the baby,' Ferdinand jokes.

'Speaking of which, I forgot to request the two of you to suggest a name for the baby earlier!' Rudolfine mentions. 'I'm certain it's a boy. I keep asking acquaintances to propose names, but have yet to find one that's just right.'

An envious expression flickers across Senta's face before she gazes at the Dutchman expectantly.

'Were it a girl, I would name her after the angel. She would thus also be named after her mother,' the Dutchman comments to Senta, then shrugs, throwing the ball back to her.

'Erik,' Senta offers, glancing at the Dutchman, who smiles.

Rudolfine is silent, but appears pleased at the name. It is Rosa who queries, 'After a friend of yours?'

'A childhood playmate,' Senta describes, 'stormy, impulsive and sombre; a hunter. Yet gentle and sensitive, noble, not self-pitying.' Seeing Rudolfine start to sketch the outline of a man with a rifle over his shoulder, she continues, 'He wears a Hirschfänger on his belt, on the left—it's an heirloom. An oblong face…'

'Oops!' Rudolfine blurts as she accidentally spatters paint slightly above an eye.

'It's fine,' Rosa reassures her.

'You like the portrait?' Rudolfine enquires, noting Rosa's interest in it. 'It's yours.'

'Poised…determined, rational but passionate. With the proud soul of an aristocrat, yet tender…' Senta resumes impetuously, her depiction now half directed to Rosa, as the Dutchman regards her with a knowing smile.

Sunset is in full swing when Rudolfine finishes the second portrait. As the two families bid farewell, the Dutchman slots white heather flowers he picked into Senta's hair. Thrilled, Senta twines her arms around his neck and kisses him on the cheek, causing his face to light up. Rudolfine overhears him whisper to Senta, 'We should change the colour of the sails.'

She glances back at the yacht in what she assumes will be a vain attempt to confirm the shade of the sails. Peculiarly, they appear a different shade than in her memory.

They're definitely scarlet, though.

[1] See What did Wagner do in Sandvika at Borøy, in Tvedestrand (http (colon) (double slash) w w w .suomenwagnerseura (point) org/s05/29-31. pdf) for a description of his experiences on 29–30 July 1839 when the schooner Thetis, which he was on board, sought a harbour of refuge in Sandvika, 'some 10 km away from the bigger place of Arendal'.

[2] Inspired by vforvendettaMA's message in the YouTube live chat of OperaVision's stream of Klaipėda State Music Theatre's large-scale open-air production of Der fliegende Holländer (https (colon) (doubleslash) operavision. eu/en/library/performances/flashback/flying-dutchman-klaipeda-state-music-theatre): 'Is that the Rheingold? ;)'

https (colon) (double slash) wx3. sinaimg. cn/large/ab602b66gy1gwtq8rq2quj21hc0u0th5. jpg

[3] An anachronistic reference to Aleksandr Grin's Scarlet Sails, available in translation at https (colon) (double slash) w w w (point) wattpad (point) com/story/173387076-scarlet-sails .