One morning Susan rises early and steps lightly and surely into the crisp air, following a gentle murmur on the back steps. Edmund doesn’t look up, which she puts down not to her superior stealth, but to the attention he’s focused entirely on a small feline eating from a dish in front of his crossed legs.

“So you see, Reginald, that’s why you don’t need to go terrorizing the local bird population and damaging the ecosystem anymore, because I’ll always be here with a plate and – oh, don’t give me that look, of course it’ll be real meat,” he’s saying, and Susan doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the animals here aren’t going to talk back, no matter how hard he tries.