Chapter One

 

Hidden Valley Ranch, also known as Rancho Arroyo Escondido to true initiates, was a unique place in many ways. It had been in the family of its current mistress, Estela Hidalgo Franklin, since nearly a century before the Mexican War whose settlement brought California into the United States around 1850. Back then, the ten-mile-long arroyo arising from a year-round spring producing a hundred gallons a minute of the sweetest water imaginable was a miraculous oasis in the otherwise dry Central California hills inland of the decaying mission of San Luis Obispo. The Hidalgo family had the land in grant from the Governor of Mexico since just before the American Revolution. This happened as a payback for the services of the original Patron against the local bandidos who had been haunting the nearby stretch of El Camino Real until subjected to frontier justice (ie, summary hangings) by the intrepid settler. He had accepted the grant with some reluctance, in that it was a good day's ride from the nearest outpost of civilization. But the unique quality of the land won him over, as it had every family member who had accepted the legacy over the next dozen generations.

It was called Rancho Arroyo Escondido for the first century of its existence, and for good reason. If a traveler didn't know exactly where to look, the narrow entrance to the mouth of the valley was all too easy to miss, even though it contained the only perpetually flowing creek within twenty miles. This hiddenness had everything to do with California geology, as the San Andreas Fault cut sharply across the mouth of the creek, forcing it into a narrow canyon between hundred foot cliffs of the rocky fault scarp. Once the Rio emerged into the broad sandy wash leading towards the Pacific, its waters rapidly disappeared into the gravel expanse to flow underground to the aquifer (or perhaps the sea itself nearly a hundred miles away). Thus, it was little wonder that no one realized what an earthly paradise was contained in the nominally paltry grant of twenty square miles of apparently desolate territory to Hector Hidalgo for his yeomanlike decimation of the ragged highwaymen that had been plaguing the infrequent travelers up the Camino.

But once the narrow pathway through the gorge had been negotiated for a sometimes harrowing half mile (if the river was high), the astonished visitor would round a rocky corner to behold a verdant gently sloping mile-wide valley nearly ten miles long, with fertile meadows next to a meandering willow and laurel lined creek. The original Casa Grande had been built on a slight knoll overlooking the entrance from the East, where a musket-wielding sharp shooter with a spare rifle and a loader could hold off a small army indefinitely (and had, on more than one occasion). The great house's adobe construction mirrored that of the distant Mission, and was gradually added to as large Catholic families increased the census of their private shangri-la over the generations. There was ample land to grow many acres of corn and beans and vegetables, as well as forage for large herds of horses and cattle that also grazed the steep slopes up to the boundary of the grant at the top of the surrounding ridges. These remained unfenced until well into the twentieth century, when oil exploration of the surrounding land finally brought at least the vestiges of industrial activity to this heretofore largely desolate region.

The Hidalgo Family was one of only a handful of original Spanish land grantees who managed to hold on to their titles and property under the dominion of the victorious Americans after the Mexican War. This was in substantial part because the matriarch of the clan at that time, still revered as the first Mamacita, deftly instructed her dutiful grown sons in how to handle their tense and complicated circumstance. The result was a careful distribution of bribes to just the right officials and in just the right quantities to buy forbearance without attracting undue attention. Thereby was preserved intact a substantial fortune accumulated in the hundred years of steady good husbandry of the land under Spanish colonial rule.

And when the Leland Stanford established his audaciously coed University a few hundred miles north, the sons and daughters of the Hidalgo Family were among its first enrollees, their admission ensured by their family's generous support of Governor Stanford's political campaigns. What was a closely held secret was that from Mamacita's day, the real power in the family always resided in the women. They just seemed to breed truer for the business skills and other leadership intangibles than the men, noteworthy primarily for their charm and good looks. Each generation, as the current Mamacita deemed appropriate, she would select one of her daughters to train to take her place as Mistress of their domain.

By the closing decades of the twentieth century, the Family had diversified and its center of power migrated north to Silicon Valley, where a grand estate had been built in the foothills above Palo Alto. And as our story begins, the role of Mamacita was occupied by the beautiful and imperious Estela Hidalgo. She was tall, slender, and pale skinned with huge brown eyes and long dark hair almost always pulled up into a practical peignoir under her signature broad-brimmed hats, straw in summer, felt in winter. These kept her skin safe from the powerful rays of the Western sun, and looking a decade younger than her 38 years. Her elegant beauty had attracted the attention of the most desirable BMOC at Stanford when she was a freshman.

James Franklin was a tall blonde fraternity boy three years older who had been washed out of a promising career as a wide receiver on the football team by a horrendous knee injury. Wooing and winning the most desirable coed in the freshman class was some consolation to the frustrated former athlete. But his (as Estela was later to discover) rather narcissistic nature showed up in various ways, including preferring not to use a condom because it interfered with his sexual pleasure in her perfect young body. The result was an unplanned pregnancy that her Catholic family would not have considered aborting, and a quick and terribly ill-advised marriage.

And so Christina Franklin was brought into the world, as gorgeous as both of her parents and innocent (unlike them) of the complexities that were to come to dominate her later life. The unlimited wealth of the Hidalgo family meant that the beautiful baby girl, who had inherited her father's vivid blue eyes and wavy blonde hair and her mother's long lean body, would never want for anything. Estela and James moved into the caretaker's cottage of her parents' Woodside estate, the family adamant that this 'bump in the road' was not going to derail their daughter's education.

Jimmy rapidly became disillusioned with the reality of life with a pregnant wife who insisted on being a top student. Their sex life, which had been smoking hot for the first few months, rapidly lost its luster as guilt and growing dissatisfaction with each other cooled their youthful passions quite rudely. By the time Christina was born, her father had already embarked on the first of a long series of affairs. And by the time their delightful little girl was entering kindergarten, her parents had separated and her ne'er-do-well father had disappeared from her life save a few annual visits and unpredictable Christmas and birthday gifts.

Also by this time, Estela had finished her schooling and left Stanford with her BA in Psychology and MBA in international business. After all, if one's family has effectively infinite wealth, then there will be no shortage of well-paid minions on staff to prevent even the most demanding of children from interfering with one's studies. And Christina was anything but difficult. She was a sweet girl by nature, and quite naturally anxious to please the grownups that dominated her life on the family estates. There were plenty of cousins of all ages and genders to roam around with, and over a hundred acres of prime Peninsula real estate to play on, all protected by high security fences and patrolled by vigilant guards. A more idyllic childhood could hardly be imagined, save for the absence of a father who became steadily more legendary in the mind of the lovely little girl.

Well, perhaps idyllic would be a bit of an exaggeration. For in spite of their generations of material comfort and world-class education, there was one little aspect of the Hidalgo family's approach to child rearing that was a bit, shall we say, out of the ordinary, at least by current day standards. And oddly, this applied only to females, which meant that it had been a feature (perhaps even a bug, Estela sometimes wondered very privately) of both her and her daughter's lives from earliest memory. It seemed that the original Mamacita had some mixed feelings about establishing a matriarchy in the Rancho Arroyo Escondido a century and a half ago. It was true that the women of their lineage seemed more fit to wield power, but the original Matriarch felt that those who would inherit that obligation needed to receive special training in self-discipline in order to exercise their dominion without self-indulgence.

Mamacita decided that her own girlhood was a good enough model. It had produced her, after all, and look how successful she had been! Her early rearing had been delegated by her own rather depressive Madre to a surrogate mother, a former nun who had been defrocked after a hushed up scandal involving naughty goings on with other novices in the convent. Madre Hidalgo had been a close confidant of the local Bishop at the Mission, and had agreed to take his embarrassing little problem off his hands. The perpetrator was whisked away to Rancho Arroyo Escondido, where she would never see the public eye again.

The former nun tasked with raising Mamacita was called Nana, and turned out to be the first in an unbroken chain of convent rejects who were brought to the Arroyo and trained by their predecessor in the proper prescribed methods of taming spirited young girls. In that era, there was no dispute that only one answer sufficed for this problem, and that was corporal punishment. Nana had learned in the convent where she was raised from earliest memory that whenever a girl misbehaved in any way, she could expect a stern or angry grownup to bend her over, raise her skirt, lower her smallclothes, and administer a spanking. This was usually delivered by a bare hand to the squirming buttocks of younger girls, and by various implements (hairbrushes, rulers, belts, switches) to the equally discomfited bottom cheeks of older miscreants. Doses of painful corrective attention were carefully prescribed and scrupulously meted out, though girls who struggled too much or tried to interfere with their bared rear ends' fates found their quotas doubled or even redoubled.

Nana believed, and Mamacita concurred, that the restraint learned in this searing cauldron of hind-end distress would serve the recipient well the rest of her life. She would be enabled to withstand any normal aggravation while maintaining her composure, since no future torment could ever match the ones she had learned to endure without complaint on a regular basis her whole childhood. Spankings were administered in Nana's study, where classroom instruction also took place, and with the ex-nun seated on an armless chair pulled from its usual position behind her desk. Crying was permitted (and in fact, its absence could be taken as a sign that more punishment was warranted), but all other verbal expressions were rewarded by even more painful attention to already quite distressed buttocks. Girls were spanked until they began having periods, after which they were considered too old for such treatment. And indeed, by that age, better than a decade of intensive education and regular discipline had with few exceptions done its work, producing the kind of teenager who would go on to become a formidable woman.