The Silent Heart

By Debra Milligan

Journey to the lush and fantastical world of Montrose, Colorado in 1895. There, a horseman named Riego Riley follows his silent heart to a woman who, initially, is forbidden him by her marriage to his curr half-brother.

Felicia Riley must free herself to love Riego. She thereby learns the eternal lesson that freedom holds the key to true love.

There was to his face a certain poetic sensuality, a depth of emotion that no one could touch, that no woman had touched, until Felicia looked upon that face and realized, with her own poetic sensuality, that Riego was a man who had hidden from his sensations, had not trusted his own emotions.

His was a silent heart, a chalice that no woman had been able to reach. That this woman, a stranger to the West, was able to tiptoe toward that heart was a miracle which Riego felt far more than she did. His life had been waiting for her. Upon that day, that sun-filled and wind-tossed afternoon when this young woman first stared at him, the silent heart of Riego Riley began to sing.

it was a whisper of melody, haunting and heroic, and this man savoured the sound of it for twas the music of love, a rare rhapsody of tenderness he’d never heard. He now would never forget the feeling of that rapture. He never could; he felt it each time that he saw the face of Felicia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Milligan
• Release date: Feb 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215867921

Debra Milligan

Debra Milligan is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is fluent in French and has varied interests in the fine arts, architecture, history of all kinds, music, horses, hounds, the Golden Age of Hollywood, quilting, fashion, and gardening.

Book preview

The Silent Heart

By

Debra Milligan

Copyright 2023 Debra Milligan

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your very own copy.

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Table of Contents

Dedication

PART I - The Girl from Lebanon

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II – The Posse

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

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Dedication

Dedicated to the silent heart

that sings.

Blood will tell.

PART I

The Girl from Lebanon

Chapter One

The buckboard rolled to a quick stop in front of a large, two-story house. A dapple gray horse with a long, dark gray mane was cantering by at that moment. He almost reared up at the jerking, jolting motion of the rig rushing toward him. A young woman with long soft brown hair gasped.

Isaac! She grabbed hold of the reins.

This man named Isaac slapped her hands away. That there’s the idiot horse of my brother who’s set astride him, like Colossus of Rhodes.

The dark blue eyes of this young woman shot a glance at this large man riding a beautifully proud beast.

He’s Riego, Isaac sneered. He breaks horses.

The horse and his rider galloped away, with neither a look nor a sound to this young woman. From a distance of twenty yards down this dirt road, the rider, named Riego, muttered, The dog returns to his vomit.

The young woman stared with confusion at her husband, Isaac Riley. She was Felicia Sutton Riley, aged twenty-three. She’d been a schoolteacher, by trade, in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio, and was arriving in Montrose as the bride of this accountant. Isaac was nearing twenty-five years of age, and was starting to show the coarseness of his preferred life style which, assuredly, was not one of matrimony.

Isaac jumped out of the buckboard and strode to his bride. Let me help you down, Mrs. Riley, he took her hand and then lifted her down from the wagon.

Felicia looked around her, with uncertainty and awe. Her eyes focused on the area to the right of the house where a row of cherry trees was in full bloom. It was early April, still chilly at night, but warm enough during the day for fluffy, lacy pink blossoms to grace these trees.

How beautiful! Felicia thought as she smiled at her tall, thin husband.

She then looked at the two-story dwelling. This house was in need of new coats of flaxen yellow paint on the clapboards and chocolate brown on the shutters. The steps leading to the porch were also in need of paint, and repair. This two-story Gothic Revival Victorian had been built fifteen years earlier, in 1880, by the father of Isaac and Riego Riley.

Oh! Felicia turned suddenly to her bridegroom. It’s a lovely work of architecture!

The cornflower blue eyes of Isaac Riley narrowed. The place is a dump, he thought. But it’s all mine, along with three hundred acres.

He grabbed a hat-box and one tapestry carpetbag from the rear of the buckboard. I’ll get that steam trunk, later, Mrs. Riley, the thin lips of this man formed a charming smile. After I introduce you to your new home.

Behind closed doors, this house was not a home to this woman, nor would it ever be. The courteous swain who had, six weeks earlier, swept Felicia off her feet became, day by day, behind closed doors, a less than courteous cad. The post-Valentine dates that she’d known with this beguiling bounder had been left behind in Lebanon, as that outbound train steamed toward the West.

Felicia was born east of the Divide, Isaac west of it. That divide all too quickly proved to be a breach, of many things, mainly trust, that would ne’er be bridged. Within a week of her arrival in Montrose, the quiet and oft-silent Felicia Sutton Riley began to question even the most simple of her decisions regarding this new life of hers in Montrose, Colorado.

The walls had begun to close in on this woman by the time a fortnight had passed in this Gothic Revival-style house. Much of this dwelling place had been built of quarry rock in a reddish-beige color. The hard and harsh coldness of the rock seemed to have penetrated each chamber in this big old empty house.

After a few nights of wedded bliss, or what had seemed akin to conjugal joy to this once fair maiden, Felicia awoke each morning, not to a husband beside her in the marital bed, but to a horridly voided space where he’d slept. His work as an accountant necessitated that he take trips, out of town, to the neighboring businesses to double-check double-ledger bookkeeping and tally up inventories.

Off he rode to prepare the books for whatever company had called upon him. Felicia was not informed of their names, or exact locations. This latest destination was somewhere north of Montrose; an imprest system of a new company awaited his financial touch.

All of these trips, their unexpected timing and infrequent frequency confused this woman. Isaac had led his fiancée to believe that he worked a routine, 9to5 job in an office in downtown Montrose, about two miles from this house.

Even more disturbing to her was the curt, frosty tone that her husband used in keeping her at bay, off-guard, and hands-off concerning his business dealings. He’d left the house two days earlier with a stern admonition regarding her questioning of his schedule that week. He declared, with ugly defiance, that he’d not wed any woman for her to keep track of his comings and goings. No woman would ever dictate to him how he lived.

All Felicia had asked was when her husband would be coming home, for dinner, so that she could prepare it for him.

That day in late April was sunny, and warm, with a stiff breeze through the cottonwood and aspen trees. Felicia had awakened early, bathed, and then donned one of her silken dresses. This one was of a sky-blue shade with navy blue satin sashes about the waist and on the short sleeves. It had become clear to this young woman that she’d not the proper garb for this locale, this climate, this new world that felt so utterly alien, unknown, perhaps unknowable to her.

Isaac had assured her that she’d love the open space and the friendly people in Montrose. She’d met no one whom she could call friendly, or even address by first name. The womenfolk eyed her with suspicion in response to her sincere but direct questions.

Who was she? Where did she come from? Why was she here? Why had she married that profligate bookkeeper, Isaac?

For Felicia, there were no neighbors, only the half-brother who lived a half-mile away, down the dirt road, called Hawthorn Lane. This horse breeder resided in a log cabin that he’d built for himself. Isaac had spent an inordinate amount of time running down his half-brother by the mouth, an often filthy mouth. There was bad blood between these two brothers, siblings separated by more than a decade, and by different birth mothers.

Isaac had told this girl from Lebanon that the school in town needed a new teacher. That statement proved to be cruelly untrue. There was no job for her there, or anywhere in this railroad town known as Montrose.

In December 1881, the first stake was driven for the railroad in what would become Montrose. The next year, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad (D&RGRR) built its narrow gauge mainline railroad through this small town, on its way from Denver to Salt Lake City, Utah. This settlement, known, among other names, as Uncompahgre Town, then officially became the town of Montrose.

In 1890, the D&RGRR completed its standard gauge railroad from Denver to Grand Junction, leaving Montrose on the narrow gauge from Salida to Grand Junction and Ouray. A branch line had been constructed in 1895 to serve the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains to the south.

Originally, Montrose was to function as a crucial link in providing supplies to mining communities. With the gradual but inevitable tapping out of those precious metal mines, however, ranching and farming became the quickest and surest ways to earn a living in the fertile Uncompahgre Valley. Montrose began to grow as a vital hub for commerce and shipping.

That economic growth attracted investors, speculators, and the usual parasites that travel, like pilot fish, and congregate around the profits to be made quickly, on the sly, under the table, or just in plain sight while nobody’s watching. Any town that starts its life for one purpose, but then has to quickly change gears is prone to high-scale speculation and corruption.

In the West of the 1880s and 1890s, newly arrived Easterners knew about nearly everything except how not to be bilked or get flimflammed by the local con artists in commercial real estate, propitious business opportunities, even quick and easy marriages that were sleazy swindles, perpetrated by the lazy lowlifes who have been a part of life since life on this earth began.

Felicia Sutton Riley, the girl from Lebanon, had felt sure that there were good fortunes awaiting her in Montrose. She could fulfill her talents as a schoolteacher and as an amateur pianist, teaching private lessons to the children of affluent citizens. Those hopes had been severely and quickly dashed by her inquiries in town regarding such positions.

In fact, there didn’t seem to be any truth to any of the bold accounts that this fly-by-night bookkeeper had given to this girl. She’d swallowed the rosy scenarios wholesale, only two weeks earlier when they were wed at the house of her parents in Lebanon, Ohio. Because of these alarming and disheartening realizations, Felicia felt poorly as she walked, late that morning, down Hawthorn Lane. The silken skirt of her fancy dress fluttered in the breeze as she trod in her low-heeled lace-up boots. With some stubbornness, she refused to believe that her husband had lied to her.

With even more trepidation, she pondered the stories told her by this husband about his half-brother. She found it hard to believe that Riego was a heartless brute, breaking horses out of sheer mean pleasure. Two weeks had transpired since that near-hazardous encounter between the buckboard and that magnificent horse with its tangled, dark gray mane, whipping through the wind like a furious flag, unfurled and racing toward the open spaces, out there before him.

Since that day, Felicia had not seen this big, burly man, nor had she wanted to. The sight of him frightened her. As she walked toward the one-story log cabin, she hurriedly contemplated, in a whir of nervous recollection, her activities of the previous fortnight.

She’d dutifully but apprehensively busied herself in this enormous two-story Gothic Revival-style house: cleaning, sweeping, dusting, tidying up, unpacking her belongings, trying to find places where those physical possessions could belong. The first tentacles of the creeping thoughts that she, Felicia Sutton Riley, did not belong in this house and would never belong in this house, had begun to taunt her, to haunt her, to tease her, and to torment her at odd moments of the day, and at peculiar intervals throughout the night. She’d awakened in the middle of the previous night in a cold sweat, alone, in their marital bed, a nocturnal locale that felt more and more like her