As far as it goes, your model is correct. What it depicts, in fact, is what many authorities regard as the historical origin of the perfect construction in utterances of the sort chasly from UK instances:
I have my homework finished = I have my homework in a finished state
Do note that, as chasly from UK cogently points out, utterances of this sort are not restricted to the narrow sense "possession"; other senses of lexical HAVE may be involved. For instance
Now that we have that problem disposed of ... to have a problem means that we are presented with the problem, not that we possess the problem
And your device of treating the two components of the construction—the HAVE form and the participle—as bearers of distinct sorts of information is to my mind a happy one for pedagogic purposes. (In fact, I have adopted it myself in my discussion of the Grammatical meaning of the construction over on ell.SE.) It is not strictly true—the 'meaning' of the construction derives from the collocation, not from the atomic meanings of its parts—but it does point up the peculiar character of the English perfect: it designates a state current at reference time which arises out of a prior eventuality. And it makes it very easy to explain the "present perfect puzzle"†: why the PrPf is not used with temporal expressions which do not include the present.
Where your model falls down is in failing to account for a number of uses to which the perfect construction has been extended since its origin in the dark backward and abysm of Old English. What you describe is the resultative or stative perfect; but there are also existential or experiential perfects ("I have often visited Paris") and continuative or universal perfects ("I have been living here since 1976"). I don't think your model will accommodate these.
(The paper by James McCawley which introduced these distinctions in 1971 also offered a Hot News perfect—"I've just won the Nobel prize!"—but this is now regarded as a special instance of existential or resultative perfects, and McCawley himself withdrew the category in 1981.)
Grammarians have been arguing about just what the perfect "means" for forty-some-odd years now. In my opinion, the most useful recent treatment is that laid out by Atsuko Nishiyama and Jean-Pierre Koenig in a series of papers culminating in “What is a perfect state?”, Language 86, 3, 2010. Nishiyama and Koenig turn their attention to the pragmatics of the perfect and conclude that
the perfect is pragmatically, rather than semantically, ambiguous. The meaning of the perfect introduces a base eventuality and a perfect state whose category is underspecified semantically. Neo-Gricean reasoning leads the hearers to appropriately fill in the value of that variable.
An earlier version of their paper is available online here, but it's formidably technical; I try to make its conclusions intelligible at §3.2 Pragmatic meaning of my post on perfects at ell.SE.
† Named by Wolfgang Klein in 'The present perfect puzzle', Language 68 (1992), 525–552. See also Anita Mittwoch, “The purported Present Perfect Puzzle”, in D. Gorland et al. (eds), Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs, 2014.
Can I just write "now it held", and it be obvious that now refers to "the point in the story currently being narrated" rather than "the point in time the reader is reading this point in the story"?
Absolutely - that is part of the craft of being a fiction writer. Although I would probably prefer the word order "But it now held just one woman.". Also a "single woman" sort of resonates in respect of whether she is married or not. There are good alternatives such as "a solitary inmate" or "a sole prisoner".
Best Answer
Perhaps, and this is only speculation, the present continuous tense be+see+ing is generally avoided in affirmations such as
and
The verb see also means to meet someone, and said aloud without any previous context, it might be understood that there's an appointment to meet up with someone called Alien, or they are dating someone called Film. I know it's unlikely, as we are all equipped with common sense and personal experiences, but the first two structures do sound a little odd nevertheless, whereas I don't find any ambiguity in the following example:
The structure be + Verb + ing expresses volition, and there is no significant difference, in terms of volition, between “I'm seeing a play” and “I'm watching a play”, the latter being only preferable if referring to a television broadcast.
Having said that, the present participle seeing + a movie often follows a preposition, and the main verb like. In the Ngram chart below, the clear frontrunner is after seeing a movie with of seeing a movie and like seeing a movie not far behind.
The results shown with the verbs are and were seem to confirm that native speakers tend to avoid the progressive tense with see a movie. This ambiguity, which I mentioned earlier, is easier to eliminate in print and with context, but maybe this infrequency of usage compared to watching a movie, is down to idiomaticity and little else.
If we compare the following results with to see a movie, Ngram produces the following chart.