HL tells us:
This is the Princesses' Bridge, and as you can see, it is the only way of getting across the shallow sound, that separates the Isle from the mainland of Clemencia, without getting one's feet wet. You can of course swim across through the deliciously azure waters - or at low tide, wade across. Sharks have occasionally been reported, though this is rare. The story is told of a German baron called von Luftballon who was once attacked by a five meter long monster as he swam there. Without losing his cool as the creature tried to devalue him of his left thigh, the baron took off his helmet and walloped it in the snout, stunning it to a standstill, giving him the time to struggle from the water.
This is a bridge with a legend, and it has to do, of course, with princesses, and similarly Beautiful People, of whom, you have probably noticed by now, Clemencia is richly endowed.
It is a simple story - any princess can only cross the bridge once, going in a single direction, and that is invariably in the direction of the tower, which has become with the passage of time a sort of stockpile of princesses, all in cold storage to keep them out of the clutches of the hot-blooded corsairs who come across from Dementia to kidnap them, and whom the princess population find much more exciting than the staid aristocrats and bankers who cannot be separated from their bridge tables and who kiss of stale cigars. They keep the keys to the tower locked up in a cast iron safe in a back room of the Royal St James Good Old Boys Club, an establishment from which women have been banned for the past five hundred years. Even Queen Victoria, on her memorable royal visit to Clemencia in 1896, was allowed no further than the front porch, where she was offered a whiskey, which she refused.
