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At Willow’s age, I often stood looking out over lavender fields, wave after wave of purplish-blue color. I envied the women and young girls doing the harvesting. They worked hunched over the rows with short sickle-shaped knives, their faces immersed in all that perfume and color, the bags slung across their shoulders swelling with the cuttings. The Beast’s chambers were also rich with color: his bedding, tapestries, paintings, even his vestments—elaborate robes, and like all ceremonial robes, designed to mask an ordinary man—reds, greens, blues and lavender. Did his owning all that color, even to his emerald ring, help convince us that God favored him? How else could he have so much?
In my teenage years, I might have been emotionally stronger, but like a bird caged from a hatchling, I
