Judith Krantz (70 page)

“All right, Jazz. Come on, Fernie, let’s go change.”

While they put on their jeans and boots, Jazz paced nervously around the fountain in the middle of the patio. The sky was a deep, pure turquoise, utterly clear after the downpour of the last few days; drops of rain that still trembled, here and there, on the vividly red Yale geraniums, became miniature prisms when the sun touched them; the air was electric in its freshness; the last roses, which she hadn’t yet had the heart to have pruned, scattered stray pink and white petals,
and the trunks of the old trees on the cypress walks were almost black with moisture.

The past week had been grim. Steve Johnson and his battery of real-estate lawyers had studied all the documents and come to the same conclusion as Rosemont and Maddox. She could devote the best part of the rest of her life to struggling, but the covenant was ultimately unenforceable.

The unanswerable decisions of her own lawyers had made Jazz withdraw entirely into herself. She had soared so high with her triumph that now she felt a thousand times a dupe and a fool for having been so cocksure that she had won. She was profoundly angry at the outcome of events, and yet so unutterably sad that she found herself unable to deal with her tattered and tangled feelings. She refused to talk about them even with Casey. All during these endless, weary days of heavy rain she’d wandered silently around the hacienda like a shamed and defeated prisoner while Casey and Joe Winter had attended to the business of the ranch from the office they shared.

Jazz felt profoundly alienated from Casey. He had taken the news of their defeat stoically, almost as if he’d expected it. He had put it behind him, accepted it as the luck of the draw. Naturally, she thought, naturally he wasn’t capable of really giving a damn, not in his heart of hearts. He’d just been humoring her, ever since she’d translated the letter. There was no reason why he should care deeply. This was just an episode in his life. The hacienda had never been his home, Mike Kilkullen hadn’t been his father, his life wasn’t intertwined with this beloved land. Why had she trusted him?

There was an invisible wall between them now, a high wall, a thick wall, a wall of unexpressed feelings and unasked questions and unmentioned sorrows and unspoken reassurance. Jazz lacked the desire even to think about it now. Marriage to Casey Nelson seemed as improbable as it would have on the night she’d met him, but she simply didn’t have the emotional energy
to deal with the problem now. She put him off with abrupt coldness whenever he tried to approach her, showing her bitter, unspoken resentment, her indifference. She couldn’t, in all justice, lump him in with her enemies, but his love—or rather what he claimed was his love—seemed no more than a memory.

Yesterday, at noon, the rains had stopped and it had turned breezy and warm enough so that Jazz had decided to take out a sailboat, looking for solace from the rhythm of the sea. But each time the wind had taken her in the direction of land, she had been confronted by the majesty of Portola Peak, and her heart had shriveled as she imagined the Sentinel Rocks being flattened by a bulldozer as the mountain was mangled and reduced to rubbish, becoming a convenient rising surface that would provide views for two dozen condos.

She’d returned from her sail, sunburned, tousled, but determined to make one last appeal to Fernanda and Valerie, face to face. She had no fantasy that she could make them change their minds, but at least when she thought about Portola Peak in the future, she wouldn’t feel that she hadn’t made one final effort to save it.

Before Fernanda and Valerie arrived, Jazz had asked one of the vaqueros to saddle up three horses on the chance that her sisters would agree to go riding. Now they ambled out of the house toward the stables, in jeans and windbreakers, walking easily in the old boots they hadn’t bothered to take with them when they’d packed after the funeral.

“Where are we going?” Fernanda asked.

“Way up beyond the bowl, to the higher land.”

“That figures,” Valerie said, settling herself on her bay horse. “Playing the landscape card, is that it, Jazz?”

“More or less. Follow me.” Jazz took off on Limonada, Valerie and Fernanda trotting after her. Once they passed the steep rim of the bowl, she urged the strawberry roan into a smooth canter. If she and her
sisters shared anything at all, it was the ability to ride vaquero-style, she thought as the strong mare forged ahead.

Jazz’s destination was a solitary sycamore on a height about eight miles away, far up and to the south, from which, by reason of the topography of the land, there was a particularly broad view that gave an idea of the grandeur of the hundred square miles of the ranch. It was far enough away from Portola so that you could see the mountain in a way that was impossible when you stood too close to it. The ancient sycamore was probably the closest thing to a central point that you could find on the fan-shaped piece of land that formed the ranch on which Jazz could ride all day and never come to a boundary.

As they rode across miles and miles of high, newly green hills, skirting groups of grazing cows and waving greetings to the vaqueros they passed, Jazz looked behind her from time to time. Her sisters were strung out behind her, Valerie first and Fernanda bringing up the rear, their hair blowing wildly, at ease in their saddles, different beings than they were indoors. She had never ridden with them like this before, not once in all these years, she realized with a pang.

“All right, Jazz, now what?” Valerie asked, once they’d arrived at the solitary sycamore. The fields that fell away from them on all sides were empty, new grass just beginning to grow on mesas that were the burnt copper of a lion’s mane. Above, a few wisps of clouds seemed pinned to the purple heights of Portola Peak. They could see the lines of waves beating against Valencia Point, but they were too far away to hear. In the silence of the vast, tranquil, blue-gold spaces of these uplands, the world was very far away.

Jazz unrolled a blanket and spread it on the damp grass. “We might as well sit down and get comfortable.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Fernanda muttered, but she flopped down on the blanket.

“Just don’t ask me to take a deep, cleansing breath, Jazz, I assume that this isn’t a Lamaze class,” Valerie said, as she sat down in a dignified way.

“I wanted to bring you here because it’s the best place to show you what the covenant includes and doesn’t include, without trying to climb up to the Sentinel Rocks.” Jazz’s statement carried the matter-of-fact truthfulness of someone with nothing left to lose.

“Covenant?” inquired Valerie.

“What
kind of rocks?” Fernanda’s question was automatic.

“My God, you don’t know! They didn’t tell you!
They had no right,
no right
—I can’t believe they kept it from you!”

“Jazz, did you tell Sir John and Jimmy something they didn’t report to us?” Valerie’s voice was sharp.

“Damn right I did. It’s not enforceable, not legally binding, but how could they dare not even mention it! You’re both just as affected as I am, you both have exactly the same heritage as I do!”

“Wait a minute,” Fernanda spoke up suddenly. “Maybe it was that thing Georgina mentioned. She said that Jimmy said you’d come up with some bizarre story, ‘a folkloric diversion,’ he called it, but it wasn’t important and Jimmy wanted to be careful not to make it seem more important than it deserved.”

“That insufferable bastard! That arrogant, dishonest scum! It’s impossible that he took it upon himself not to tell you!”

Furiously, Jazz went to get the bundle of papers she’d attached to her saddle earlier, just in case Valerie and Fernanda expressed enough curiosity to ask to see the actual documents. Her hands were shaking with rage as she spread the copy of the
diseño
on the blanket and started to arrange the other papers and photographs around it.

“Jesus Christ, he didn’t even tell you about the letter from our great-great-great-grandmother! ‘Folkloric diversion,’ my ass!”

Valerie’s ancestor interest was immediately
aroused, particularly since Jazz had already said that nothing was legally binding.

“Jazz, start from the beginning. Stop shuffling all those papers around and tell us what this is all about,” she commanded.

“Only if you promise not to interrupt.” Suddenly Jazz saw a patch of hope appear on the gray screen of her mind. Her father had told her the history of the Valencias little by little when they sat keeping each other company in the archive room, but there was no reason to assume her sisters had necessarily heard anything more than just a sketchy account. Mike Kilkullen had never been one to glory in tales of old families, even his own.

She began to relate the story of her search, starting at the very beginning and taking them through the discovery of the map at the Huntington Manuscript collection and the translation of the covenant made by Bernardo Valencia, in which he had renewed the promise made by Teodosio Valencia in 1808.

“Michael Kilkullen,” Jazz said as she showed them the tracing of the map, “our great-great-grandfather, respected this covenant and his son respected the covenant. The letter’s proof of that. There’s a powerful reason why the ranch has never been sold, why it’s been handed intact from one head of the family to the other. Father used to say that even when he was a child, his grandfather made him promise never to sell even an acre of land.”

“I remember him saying that … but it isn’t anything more than an outmoded point of view,” Valerie insisted.

“Oh, Val, don’t be so literal, it’s family history,” Fernanda protested.

“You’re both interrupting,” Jazz said, and proceeded to tell them about the search for the Sentinel Rocks, right up to the day she had confronted Rosemont and Sir John with her evidence and learned that it was worthless in a court of law.

“Since you believed that we’d been told about
this already, Jazz, why did you bring us here today?” Valerie asked, wariness clear in her voice. “What’s your point? To make us feel that we’re doing something wrong? Breaking faith with the past? My God, that old covenant was made practically two hundred years ago—at a time when it cost Bernardo Valencia absolutely nothing to make such a promise—you know as well as I do that no one would ever do it today, not in the modern world.”

“Val, I never had a plan to accuse you of guilt. I wanted you to
feel
something and I knew that the only place you could feel it was here, right here, with the ranch spread around us, not in a hotel suite. Valerie! Fernanda!” Jazz’s voice rose in intensity. “Has it ever really sunk into your heads that once this land is sold it can
never be replaced
? One of the most precious real properties on the planet will disappear forever under millions of square feet of concrete and stone and marble. Think of all the people who buy expensive objects: antiques, old masters, Chinese Import dinner services and Aubusson carpets. Then they stuff their new houses with them to show everyone how rich they are. They buy castles, they buy islands, they buy vineyards. But not one of them, not one of those men in the
Forbes
list of the richest men in America, could buy our ranch without putting up his entire fortune and more. Look around you! This land is our birthright, and once it’s gone, no power on earth can replace it. If we don’t sell it, we’ll be rich beyond imagination.”

“You can’t spend imagination,” Valerie said flatly.

“Jazz, this land is worth too much money to keep. We can’t afford to hold on to it.” Fernanda was almost plaintive, but positive.

“Wait a minute! Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we keep every last acre of the land for ourselves. Of course that’s out of the question. But I
am
asking you to consider an alternative.”

Jazz pointed south, beyond the area protected by the Twin Pointed Rock, where miles of mesas lay.
“Way over there, near the ocean, but not on it, the three of us could develop an entirely new town, a sort of urban village, planned for tens of thousands of inhabitants. Eventually as many as eighty thousand people could live together surrounded on all sides by unchanged countryside. It would generate a vast income in the future, it could only become more valuable every year, and you could be proud of it in a way you could never be of the development plan that Jimmy Rosemont told me about that day at the Ritz.”

“Just what is wrong with that plan, may I ask?” Valerie asked defensively.

“Oh, Valerie, Valerie, I may not know you as well as Fernanda does, but I’m absolutely sure of one thing—you wouldn’t be caught dead in that place! You wouldn’t even be
sick
there.”

“It’s clearly not designed to appeal to me.” Valerie tossed her head in vexation. “What does that have to do with its commercial value?”

“The houses and condos would sell, I don’t doubt that. The kind of high-tech security it would offer would appeal to every international arms dealer, every major junk-bond salesman—the ones who are still out of jail—every big-time money launderer, every oil-rich foreign billionaire—it would turn into an enclave of frightened rich people from all over the world, huddled together, busily outspending each other. Can you even begin to imagine what Father would have thought of turning the ranch he loved so much into a place like that? You can’t deny it, Valerie, the plan calls for the creation of a citadel to protect people with nothing in common but the most pretentious and ostentatious way of life—it’s simply not
you
, Valerie.”

“I never said I wanted to have a place there,” Valerie snapped, biting her lips. “My individual preferences have nothing to do with it.”

“Ah! But our name would be on it. ‘Rancho Kilkullen,’ as that bastard Rosemont called it. And even if we gave it another name, do you think everyone won’t know that the Kilkullen sisters have sold out their family’s Spanish land grant, a piece of American
history that goes back
eight generations
, to Hong Kong bankers? It would be a hell of a story all over the world. One thing we’d have to face would be publicity—all of it
vile
, you can count on that—which would follow us for the rest of our lives, and follow your children too. You
must
know it would spoil them rotten. As for us, we’d be sitting ducks for the press, three present-day, ready-made little Barbara Huttons or Christina Onassises. The three sisters who got a billion dollars each for their land. The media will cover every step we take, for God’s sake! That’s one reason why the old rich in this country—in every civilized country, for that matter—stay so carefully out of the public eye. How much publicity do you see about the Mellons or the Goelets or Betsy Whitney or the Browns of Providence or the Biddies or the Mathers or the Pennocks?”