I’d been watching the post like a hawk, praying for my acceptance letter to Oxford. If I didn’t get in, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just wanted to get the hell away from STAGS, to be with Shafeen and Nel if they got in, in a world of sanity. I wondered if the Abbot knew something I didn’t, that my Oxford letter had finally come, but what did that have to do with Acre Wood?
This being STAGS, the sixth-form Common Room had a whole wall of these little pigeonholes for post, with small brass letters of the alphabet screwed onto them. I looked in M for MacDonald and, sure enough, there was a stiff cream envelope with my name handwritten on the front. As I slid it out there was no Oxford postmark to be seen, no University of Oxford franking stamp. In fact, there was no stamp of any kind.
I turned the envelope over and saw a wax seal. Memory made my heart begin to thud. Not because I recalled that long-ago invitation slipped under the door of my room. But because I remembered a letter at Cumberland Place, a letter that was so dangerous it had to be burned.
For this wax was not the blood red of the STAGS stockings and the Longcross dog rose. It was a more orangey, rusty red. And the imprint on the wax was not a pair of antlers, but a face.
A pointy animal face.
A face that belonged to a fox.
I broke the seal and this is what I read:
Greer,
We bear you no ill will, even though you foiled our own particular Gunpowder Plot. You should not blame yourself for not uncovering us sooner – you made a mistake, but you are in good company. That same mistake was first made by a king.
When James I heard about the first Gunpowder Plot he was actually out hunting. His response, when he heard his assassin’s name was Fawkes, was, ‘I have known a king to hunt a fox, but never a fox to hunt a king.’ So you see, he got the name wrong too.
Ever since then there has been an underground movement – the sons and daughters of those thirteen gunpowder plotters – who have been fighting against the Establishment. We have multiple branches, and myriad names. But mostly we have assumed the title James I gave us when he mistook the name of our leader. You see, it seemed to encapsulate the careless, cavalier way those with power treat those without. Did James ever bother to learn Guy Fawkes’s true name, even when he was hanged, drawn and quartered? Probably not. And because of this, that mistake became our name.
The FOXES.
If they don’t know who we are, Greer, they never see us coming.
The Order of the Stag has been our most ancient foe. This time you saved their hides, but we feel, most strongly, that in your heart you might be more of a Fox than a Stag. We have pledged to bring down the corrupt Establishment, to fight inequity, to smash the patriarchy. The fox is our emblem, a sigil of the fightback, the hunted turning to bite the hunter, the uneatable pursuing the unspeakable. Like the Order of the Stag, we have a leader, an opposite number to their Grand Stag. And, just the same, that title is passed from generation to generation. It is a name you know well, and it is the one with which I will sign this letter.
Yours, in the hope that you will join our struggle,
Reynard