Searching another desk and coming up with nothing, Felton folded his arms. “The information was to be here. The informant who is helping the blockade runner sink our ships needs to be stopped. Good men are dying.”
The perspiration that dampened his brow began to pool at his collar and run cold down Felton’s heated back. Hot natured all his life, he should revel in a climate made for shedding clothes and rolling up sleeves, but Felton remained buttoned. Smallpox scars marring his arms were hard to keep secret in sweat-inducing environments.
Johnson returned to the door. “More people. Someone has told them that we’d strike tonight. We’re in trouble.”
Felton’s neck prickled. He adjusted the ribbon pulling back his hair. “We can’t stay and find out. We are too far for the Department of War and the Colonies to send help.”
Holding his hand out, Johnson signaled one, two, three, four, five. That meant there were five additional men milling in the dimly lit hall close to the office they burglarized. They were compromised. They had to become invisible.
Felton closed his eyes and slowed his breath.
Calm.
Think.
Plan.
That was the mantra that had always saved his life. He just needed to get himself and Johnson out of the building and to stay hidden from the soldiers until they could get out of Demerara. “I should’ve brought Old Brown, the best blunderbuss pistol.”
“Let’s go out the window, Gantry. You have girls to go home to. I’ve got my family, my new son. We survive this one, I’m done.”
“That will be what we discuss on the boat out of here.” He looked out the window. “We’re up a story. It’s going to be a bit of a jump.”
“Like the cliffs in Grenada, just without the water. Remember?”
That was crazy, but he and Johnson and their comrade Watson survived. “You first.”
Cracking open the shutters, Felton saw two soldiers doing rounds chatting. Their words were bits of Dutch, maybe French. “I’m rusty on anything but guilders.”
“Ya one to know Dutch money, my friend.” Johnson’s accent was thicker, as if he practiced how to blend in with the locals. He’d become invisible. Felton would stand out. It would be difficult to survive the night, but they’d always been lucky in the Caribbean.
“Johnson, the soldiers have cleared. Out the window. Hide in the brush. Get back to the docks in the morning. Since I stand out, I’ll be a bumbling drunk and make enough noise for you to get away.”
“A drunk is not invisible, my friend. Not your usual approach but a white man has less chance of getting shot.” Johnson clasped hands with Felton.
His soulful dark eyes said all that the two men would never voice—the respect and unspoken thank-yous for saving someone’s hide, stopping a bar fight, or stymying a bullet. “Good luck.”
His friend climbed out the window; the athletic fellow dropped then rolled until he made it undetected into the bushes lining the road.
Before he could join Johnson, guards came around again. He ducked down. His heart pounded, and he whipped his head from the office door to the window.
Times like this, with his chest gonging, he missed boring London and being a gentleman in the country. Johnson was right. How much longer could he do these missions with his girls needing him to stay alive?
They’d mourned too much.
He’d liked to think he’d stopped wars and disarmed attacks on the British vessels with the information he and his counterparts like Johnson purloined for the Department of War and the Colonies.
Maybe he had.
Maybe not.
Selfishly, the time away gave him the pleasure to be something different than a widower whose newborn son and wife died hours apart. He definitely escaped being a mild-mannered man with a demented father, rakish cousins, and an overly zealous sister.
How could he leave Amelia and Agatha, his beloved daughters, to that? Something needed to change.
If he lived, he’d talk with Lord Liverpool, secretary of the department. The man who recruited him from the battlefields had to be the one to let him quit.
No more noise outside the window.
