UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE HarperCollins Publishers ..................................................................
Chapter Thirty
Westminster Bridge fell.
London was sleeping when the bridge fell. London was still and unaware; was as Wordsworth wrote, ‘all bright and glittering in the smokeless air’; was wearing like a garment ‘the beauty of the morning; silent, bare’.
Later, Oxford residents would claim that they, too, knew the moment that Westminster Bridge had fallen – this despite the cities being over a hundred miles apart, and there being no building tall enough to see London from that distance. Regardless, dozens of witnesses claimed – perhaps due to group hallucination, or perhaps an invisible effect of the resonance rods – that they heard it breaking before it collapsed. ‘It was this terrible feeling that gnawed at your gut,’ said Professor Harrison Lewis, Merton College, Natural Philosophy. ‘The most intense dread. You knew something was about to happen, and you only later learned what.’ Eyewitness accounts from London herself described it as a great rumbling. ‘Like the stones were screaming,’ said Mrs Sarah Harris, washerwoman. ‘They seemed to be telling you to get away, and Heaven knows I listened.’ This was a city used to bridges falling into disrepair, mind. London Bridge had become unusable at least thrice in her history – once by ice, and many times by fire. But London Bridge, despite the songs, had only ever partially collapsed. It had never fallen plumb into the water.
Westminster Bridge did. ‘It was so very clean,’ said Mr Monks Creedy, chimney sweep. ‘One moment it was in the air.
And then it wasn’t.’ It did not fall without warning. Eyewitnesses reported that the stones grumbled for twenty minutes before, and this gave most pedestrians time to flee to either end. Two steamships were crossing beneath when the rumbling began, and both tried to clear the bridge – one by reversing, and the other by accelerating ahead. The result was a traffic pile-up that trapped both ships, and many other boats, right beneath the bridge. ‘It was like Jericho when the walls came down,’ said Mr Martin Green Esq., solicitor. ‘It was so neat. Like it all fell at the call of some invisible trumpet.’ The human toll remains under debate, for there is the uncertain number of pedestrians on the bridge at the moment of collapse (at least sixty-three, including one MP who had in fact been against the war), the victims on the ships below, and those who died in the river accidents that followed.
‘I saw a lady yelling by the bank,’ said Mrs Sue Sweet, housekeeper. ‘She was screaming for this houseboat to come and fetch her. Only the houseboat was too far away, and by the time she thought to run, the stones were upon her.’ When asked if she thought the fall of Westminster Bridge might advance the translators’ cause, Mrs Sweet said, ‘No. I don’t think they did this. No man could do this. Something like this could only be an act of God.’
