Judith Krantz (63 page)

Fernanda lay back, trying to hold still, as she felt the little tongue lapping warmly on the material that covered her lower lips, but soon she knew that she had to have more. She pulled off her panties in a quick movement and spread her legs apart, breathing shallowly, holding herself open with her fingers so that Georgina had complete access to her clitoris. “More,” Fernanda commanded, “more, don’t dare to stop … put it in as far as you can.” She felt the small tongue push forward with surprising strength, entering
her and circling knowingly around a few marvelously sensitive inches, and then draw back while Georgina released and exposed Fernanda’s clitoris with her fingers, curling her tongue around the fattening flesh and sucking with her whole inner mouth. Over and over, with groans of ever-renewed hunger, she repeated the two acts, first invading as far as she could, then withdrawing and sucking again, and each time she did so, Fernanda felt herself growing bigger and bigger, as if her clitoris had turned into the swelling tip of a small, firm penis. She lost herself in growing passion, a passion only possible because there was no invasion of her body, a passion only possible because Georgina knew so precisely what to do to her, because Georgina had a woman’s body and a woman’s mind and knew how to give another woman exactly what she needed.

Slowly, from far away, she felt a climax building, but she gave no indication of it because she was absolutely secure in the knowledge that her slave would not stop until she allowed her to stop, that her slave wanted this act to last as long as possible, that her slave demanded nothing, that her slave could last forever. No rush, there was no rush, Fernanda thought, drowned in sensations she had never had before, how wonderful to know that there was no rush.

Slowly the tugging and licking of Georgina’s mouth, the thrusting of Georgina’s tongue, began to become too exciting to endure in silence, soon Fernanda was unable to stop herself from making noises she’d never made with any man, sounds that didn’t make Georgina falter in her rhythmic plunder. Nothing would make her stop too soon, nothing would make her take her lovely tongue away and substitute a hard, determined penis, an unwanted, unnecessary penis. Fernanda arched higher and put her hands behind Georgina’s smooth head and ground her distended, engorged, open mound into Georgina’s greedily obedient mouth, urgently, madly, as the climax that had started far away came closer and closer until it was upon her, until it could be held back no
longer, until she gave herself up to it, finally feeling the power, bigger than she was, take her in its grip and make her scream with joy.

“Everything … everything’s different now,” Fernanda said, when she could finally speak.

“I love you, Fernie.”

“All these years … oh, Georgie … never never knowing what it could be … you were so … I can’t tell you …”

“Don’t say anything, just let’s cuddle, just let me hold you quietly, my beautiful darling.” She took Fernanda in her arms and rocked her gently, holding her firmly but without any sensual intention, yet Fernanda, who had just had the first real orgasm of her life, now freed of her preoccupation with her own body and its unsatisfied needs, suddenly found herself acutely conscious of the pungent fragrance of Georgina’s naked body.

Her curiosity awoke, and the wonder with which she had looked at Georgina’s ripe nakedness quickly turned into something other than wonder. That lush, opulent young fullness, that white skin with its sensuous pink shadows, those light brown nipples riding those large, luxuriously heavy breasts, those delectable light red curls that hid Georgina’s rounded mound, were all unexplored, untasted, all tantalizingly unknown, and all incredibly tempting. Without thinking about what she was doing, she started to fondle Georgina whose eyes were filled with laughing submission, Georgina whose whole face was rosy and open and joyful, Georgina whom she loved. Fernanda felt a flame of unaccustomed, violent lust, a newborn, foreign desire that no man had ever caused, begin to rise from her deepest center, and without a word, without asking the slightest permission, she drew herself up on the bed and pinned Georgina’s arms to the mattress as she straddled the magnificent body that lay sprawled under her, that still-mysterious body that belonged to her now. She could feel herself swelling heavily, aggressively, needily. Again, oh yes,
again
.

“You don’t have to …” Georgina whispered. “It was just to make you happy …”

“Be quiet and lie still. I’m going to fuck you.”

“Susie, did you ever hear much about my great-grand-mother Amilia?” Jazz asked, as she sat at the kitchen table watching the tiny cook work with her usual busy efficiency.

“How could I have, Jazz? I didn’t start to work here till 1961. We’re not going to fight about my age again, are we?” Susie squinted at Jazz through knowing eyes. Her girl had been up to something, that was for sure, and on a rainy Sunday, what else could it have been but what she’d been expecting for a long time now? It hadn’t made her ugly, that was for sure. High time too. Mike Kilkullen would have wanted Casey and Jazz to find out that they loved each other, no matter how miserable they were about him.

“You speak Spanish at home, don’t you, Susie?” Jazz asked.

“That depends. My boys speak both, my husband feels happier speaking Spanish, my mother only speaks Spanish, my grandchildren don’t know much Spanish but the swear words.”

“Can you read traditional Spanish?”

“Juanita Isabella, can you read English?” Susie sniffed. “What do you think I had to study for four years in high school?”

“Sit down, for heaven’s sake, and look at this.” Jazz thrust the yellow pad and the letter at Susie.

“Oh, been doing homework, have you?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s the way your homework used to look. What a mess! But not as bad as Casey’s room and the archive room. I’ve got the roofers working up there already, before it rains again.”

“Please, Susie, give me some help. This is a letter I found from my great-great-grandmother to my great-grandmother Amilia. I can’t translate this paragraph—it doesn’t make much sense to me.” Jazz showed her the part of the letter that she had attempted to
translate the night before, and Susie took out her glasses and puzzled over the faded brown ink of the elaborate baroque handwriting.

“I’ve got the gist of it,” she said at last. “Do you want it word for word?”

“The gist.”

“Well, as far as I can tell, it seems that when the Valencias sold the ranch to the Kilkullens, there was some sort of strict covenant on the ranch that one of the Valencias had made a very, very long time ago with the local Franciscan friars, the priests at the Mission probably, when they were still there. Anyway, the Kilkullens were just as good Catholics as the Valencias, and they agreed to respect this sacred covenant. Basically, Amilia was being reassured that the Kilkullens were as God-fearing as the Valencias and that she should be proud to marry into the family.”

“How could that be? I’ve never heard of any covenant,” Jazz protested.

“Maybe it wasn’t called a covenant. Maybe it had something to do with the story about the Mission that my mother used to tell me. She heard it from her grandmother, who probably heard it from her mother, so it goes back really far. They called it the story of the ‘Promise of the Mountain.’ ”

“You never told it to me.”

“While you were little enough for bedtime stories, you had your mother … and then … you had Rosie taking care of you, and your father to tell you stories—you weren’t sitting around the kitchen bothering me, and anyway I had work to do, cooking for everybody in the house.”

“Tell it to me now!”

“Oh, it’s a lovely tale about the building of the Mission in San Juan Capistrano. It took nine long years to build the Great Stone Church. It wasn’t finished until 1806. The bell tower of the church was taller than any other building that had ever been built in California. It was the wonder of the land. Year after year, men and women and every child who was old enough, helped to build the church. Some of them
carried stones by hand, some of them brought them in wooden carts, they found sycamore wood on the Trabuco mesa, sandstone and limestone were quarried miles away, even stones from Valencia Point were carried to the church. When the Great Stone Church was finished, people flocked here from ranchos everywhere in California, soldiers and dignitaries and hundreds of Indian converts, all the people dressed in their finest clothes, so proud and so happy. Afterwards there was the greatest fiesta anybody can remember, and the people celebrated for days on end. They prayed and paraded and danced and sang. To give thanks for the completion of the Great Stone Church, old Teodosio Valencia and a group of Franciscans climbed up Portola Peak—only they called it the Mountain of the Moon then, of course—and they say Teodosio found a holy place all the way up on the mountain where he made a solemn promise to the holy fathers who had made the pilgrimage. He took a vow that the hand of man would never change anything on his land, not for as far as the eye could see from the Mountain of the Moon.”

“That was the ‘promise of the mountain’?”

“Yes, the story always ended with those words, ‘for as far as the eye can see.’ Now, Jazz, you know about those old stories. There’s supposed to have been an old mission in San Juan too, one that’s still older than the Mission, but nobody’s ever been able to find out where it was—the Mission Viejo—and there’s probably no holy place, no shrine, or whatever on Portola Peak either.”

“But that story lasted almost two hundred years!”

“All good stories do, and a lot longer than that—I could tell you dozens of them, each one with a miracle in it. I’ll start with the parting of the Red Sea.”

“Susie, you’re a cynic.”

“I’m a realist, honey. Working for the Kilkullens has overloaded my sense of romance.”

W
hen Jazz brought herself to tell Casey of the discouraging discussion she had had with Steve Johnson, the deep vein of business acumen that underlay his other activities forced him to agree with the verdict of the probate litigator: Jazz might delay the development of the land, but she could never stop it.

She added what she knew of Susie’s tale of the promise of the mountain and Amilia’s perplexing, unclear letter about a covenant.

“Don’t they sound as if they must mean something important?” Jazz asked hopefully.

“Look, darling, the Monte Carlo idea is appalling,” Casey replied, “but we can’t fight it with anything but hard facts. There’s got to be someone who might make a connection between the story and the letter, otherwise we’re dealing with phantoms, clutching at straws, Who, besides Susie, is a repository of local yarns?”

“Maybe … maybe Mr. White, the man who read us the will, although he’s about a hundred years
too young. Still, his family has done business with my family forever.”

“Let’s make an appointment with him. He may not be an Indian medicine man, but he’s the only game in town.”

As they climbed the flight of stairs to Henry White’s office in San Clemente, Jazz stopped halfway up. “Maybe it’s not even a straw I’m clutching at, maybe I’ll be wasting his time.”

“Nonsense,” he said, propelling her up the stairs, “how often does he get to enjoy looking at a girl like you?”

Henry White received them with his usual graciousness, less startled by Jazz’s introduction of Casey as “my fiance” than was Jazz, who had never used those words before, but felt that there was no other way to present Casey properly to such a dignified figure as the retired banker.

After she’d shown him Amilia’s letter and told him Susie’s story, he leaned back in his chair and shook his head wistfully.

“That’s a pretty bit of a romantic jigsaw puzzle you’ve found, my dear Jazz, but I’ve never heard this particular story before, and the letter could mean anything or nothing.”

“I know, but … Teodosio Valencia was granted the land by the Crown of Spain in 1788 …”

“My dear, if we’re going to get involved with Spanish land grants, we’re going to waste our time. There were only between twenty and thirty original Spanish land grants made—experts disagree on the number—and no documentation of them, to my knowledge, exists today. Perhaps there is an actual grant in the bottom of a trunk somewhere, but the odds are that they have all been lost or destroyed. Nobody I’ve heard of has ever seen one. The Dead Sea Scrolls aren’t as mysterious.”

“Still, the covenant has to mean
something,”
Jazz said stubbornly, “or Juanita Isabella wouldn’t have written about it in a letter that was so important
to Amilia that she put it in her portfolio with her most precious souvenirs, her love letters and her photographs of her husband.”

“If there were something really important in the form of a covenant with the Franciscans, it would have been mentioned elsewhere than in a wife’s private hoard of sentimental bits of paper,” Henry White said. “No, my dear, it would have been documented and registered and had legal authority behind it, somewhere, somehow.”

“What kind of documentation?” Casey asked.

“Ha! What kind indeed! You’ve jumped straight into the middle of the godawful morass of California history, a pitiful story of injustice piled on injustice, a veritable sinkhole of complications and confusion. Ha! Not from around here, are you, Mr. Nelson?”

“No sir, New York.”

“Well, it wouldn’t make any difference if you’d been born here. Nobody even studies the history of the United States any more, much less California.” Mr. White smiled at them both, looking like a mar who had been waiting for years for two fools like them to come asking him things he knew and they didn’t, Jazz decided through her impatience to know whatever he knew.

“Mr. White,” she said, meltingly, “could you try to fill us in?”

“Ha! Fill you in, indeed! There’s no way to do it except to start at the beginning, in 1769, when the Spanish viceroy established a Royal Presidio in San Diego. He sent an expedition up the coast to look for Monterey Bay, sixty-three men and two priests, led by Don Gaspar de Portola. They walked their way up the coast, baptizing every child they could get their hands on, I wouldn’t wonder. Eventually the Franciscan priest Fra Junípero Serra established twenty-one missions from San Diego north. Most of the surrounding land was claimed by those missions, but some land grants were made to individuals, primarily old soldiers who had served well.”