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.

The same era in which this tradition was established also happened to foster a belief (later debunked) that dysfunctions of the bowels of children were a common culprit for all manner of ills, including peckish moods and sullenness. Thus, many generations of youngsters had been subjected to trips over their Mother's or Nanny's lap to receive an enema up their bottom holes, in order to regulate the function of that orifice according to the dictates of the administering authority. At the Rancho Arroyo Escondido, or later on the estate in Woodside, this method was used to potty train each of Nana's protégés for a dozen generations. The equipment would change as the technology of such devices matured, but the method was always the same.

The time for such interventions was just before the girl's nightly bath, and the nightgown-clad subject would be gently but firmly drawn over her Nana's lap, where the nighty would be raised and underpanties lowered to bare the target for its necessary invasion. The reservoir for the enema would have been pre-filled with warm soapy water, and its tubing would have been clamped and connected to the nozzle, of ivory until well into the 20th century, and then of plastic, though always white so any contamination could be immediately detected. Lard would have been used as a lubricant until the roaring twenties, when petroleum jelly would have made its appearance. The girl would have long since learned that any complaint or lack of cooperation would mean that the exposed region would be spanked as well as internally violated. So she would remain quiescent throughout the proceedings. In fact, each generation learned to rather enjoy this ritual, since it was the time of day in which she was treated most tenderly as long as she cooperated fully.

Once the rectal thermometer was invented and became widely available, this ritual was expanded to include the taking of a girl's temperature in order to be meticulously recorded in her Nana's diary (along with any punishments she had received that day, including the misbehaviors that precipitated them). The ex-nun's gentle hand would cup the bottom cheeks it had belabored painfully so many times to hold first the thermometer and then the nozzle in place. This tender holding and subtle stroking combined with the complex but interesting sensations of the nozzle occupying her back passage and the warm fluids filling her bowels to transport each girl into a pleasant, if rather erotically charged, reverie. Eventually, the enema would have filled her down there, and her bowels would begin grumbling to be allowed to evacuate themselves. Nana would leave for this once her charge was old enough to be on her own, helping the girl onto the chamber pot before exiting during the expulsion.

Once the lid was on the results of this procedure (which Nana would examine later and note in her diary), the older woman would return and give her student her nightly bath. All of the girls learned to thoroughly enjoy this part of their evening, as the usually severe ex-nun would turn totally gentle. A soapy cloth would be deployed to wash every inch of them, paying especially careful attention to those parts that were particularly dirty, in the parlance of the Nanas. This of course especially included the bottom that had just been emptied, as well as all of the very sensitive structures nearby between each girl's legs. In addition, the Nanas seemed to pay very patient attention to washing their charges' nipples, even at a very young age. The perverted ex-nuns actually fostered (and passed down from generation to generation) the belief that this procedure caused the women of the Hidalgo family to develop early and grow robust breasts. Ironically, when a deeper understanding of the consequences of early erotic stimulation of girls were better understood, this superstition was in fact borne out to be true.

What also turned out to be true for successive generations almost without exception of Hidalgo matriarchs was that they had an exceedingly complicated relationship to their sexuality. The combination of regular painful attention to their buttocks with equally ritualized invasion of the secret orifice between them always followed by highly gratifying and arousing erogenous touch led to a uniform erotic charge in their relationship to their bottoms. The fact that these attentions came exclusively from women, and indeed from women whom the children almost always came to adore, ended up in fostering at least a covert bisexuality in most of Mamacita's successors. And the combination of strong Catholic education with implacable punishment of perceived sins meant that however powerful each family matriarch might be, she was secretly convinced of her need to be punished for her shortcomings, the vast number of which had been long drilled into her squirming buttocks as a girl.

In every generation, since Mamacita set the tone for all successors, open conversation about any topic was always encouraged between mothers and daughters. This was part of why all disciplinary tasks were delegated to the Nanas. No Hidalgo daughter ever had to fear painful consequences for any question or statement she might make to her mother. Therefore, Estela was hardly surprised when her precocious and adorable blonde angel of a daughter was cuddling in her lap one night and said: ‘Nana takes me over her knee and spanks my heinie really hard when I'm naughty.’ The Matriarch replied: ‘I know, dear one. My Nana did the very same thing to my heinie, probably a lot more often than happens to you, since I was a much naughtier child than you are. It's how girls are brought up in our family, so you shouldn't worry about it, but you can talk to me about it whenever you want. But we don't talk about any of the things our Nanas do to our bottoms to anyone else but our Mommies, since other people might not understand. Think of it as a special family secret that we all have kept since long before you or I were born. It's part of what makes us different from other families, in the best possible way, I think. Our Nanas help to make us good and strong, even if they have to make our bottoms feel...uncomfortable from time to time.’ Beautiful blonde Christina had no reason to do anything other than take her dear loving Mama at face value, and the subject was never again broached.