THERE ARE THOSE WHO BELIEVE THAT TRUE LOVE is humankind’s greatest motivator.

Those people are sweet but completely wrong.

Certainly, true love is a powerful force, but the actual greatest motivator of all is undoubtedly revenge. Humans will climb the highest tower for love, but then murder everyone inside that tower for revenge.

And then possibly demolish the tower.

Once someone commits to a course of vengeance, the changes inside begin: their heart becomes petrified so that love may not enter. Their senses of reason and perspective are cauterised so that good judgement shall never prevail. And any code of decency that they may have lived by is replaced by a single commandment: Thou shalt do whatsoever needs to be done.

This is the story of one such revenger and the children he would cheerfully go to the ends of the earth to have his revenge upon. It is also the story of what those children were up to that summer, as these were not the kind of youngsters to simply laze around, waiting for vengeance to be visited upon them.

The man was Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, the Duke of Scilly, and the children, you may be less than surprised to learn, were the Fowl Twins.

It may seem unlikely that a peer of the British realm would devote his precious time to the killing of twelve-year-old Irish twins, but these particular boys had grievously wronged the duke, and Lord Teddy was determined to repay them in kind, by which he meant slay them in a convoluted and epic manner.

For decades, Lord Teddy had been consumed by two objectives:

1. Live as long as possible (one hundred and fifty years plus so far). And …

2. Mount a claim to the British throne. But for this he would need the Lionheart ring, which we shall come to later.

And now Teddy had developed a third obsession: killing those blasted twins.

It may also occur, if a person is at all familiar with the notorious Fowl Twins, that the duke’s chances of putting one over on Myles and Beckett were slim at best. But Lord Bleedham-Drye was something of a specialist in the art of vengeance. This was not, as American humans might say, his first rodeo.

In point of fact, Lord Teddy considered the Fowl crusade to be the third epic revenge campaign in his one-hundred-and-fifty-year life. His first was hunting the border-fens fox to extinction simply because one had stolen a salmon sandwich from Queen Victoria’s fingers at a picnic he was hosting, which was simply devastating for the duke, as it put the brakes on his plan to become her second husband, the most direct route to the crown.

The second quest for vengeance is quite famous in the annals of American crime history, as there was quite a gruesome spate of homicides of snake-oil salesmen in the western states during the mid-twentieth century. Lord Teddy had visited such a salesman in California and purchased a life-extending elixir. The concoction had brought on a series of catastrophic bowel movements while he was attending an opera at the governor’s mansion. So outraged was the duke by this public humiliation that he did away with the entire network of salesmen over the following season.

Of course, Teddy had dealt many other swift retributions, but he did not count these as proper revenges, as the duke agreed with Charles Dickens, who wrote: Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.

Lord Teddy considered the Fowls worthy of a campaign because he could honestly say that no human beings living or dead had infuriated him more than the twins. Not only had they avoided being permanently murdered, but they had also utterly ruined Lord Teddy’s birth body, thus forcing the duke to have his living brain transferred into a cloned host. To cap it all, they put a rather big hole in his front lawn. And, as every royal correspondent knows, nothing matters more to a duke than his daffodils.

No, Teddy old boy, the duke told himself, the Fowl blighters simply have to go, and that’s all there is to it.

And so Lord Teddy laid his elaborate and unnecessarily complicated plans, resolving that on this occasion he would take pains not to underestimate the Irish boys as he had in the past.

Ishi Myishi, Lord Teddy’s closest friend and arms dealer to the world’s criminal masterminds, had once told him, ‘He who commits his life to revenge is already dead,’ but this did not deter the duke from his course in the least, because his plan actually depended on him being dead.

I will be completely and undeniably deceased, thought Teddy as he reclined in the brass bathtub of electric eels where he did the lion’s share of his plotting. And that will be my advantage.