Success, my employer. I have located the former chancellor of Oriana, the man known as Grumper.
He looks so much older than his portrait. Records of his birth date indicated that he should be slightly past middle age, but it is clear that the years have not been kind to him. His hair has grayed, and is somewhat tangled and unkempt. His pale blue eyes still have the mischievous sparkle of youth to them, though they have also become bloodshot and watery perhaps from a lack of sleep. His face is covered with stubble, that like his blonde hair, has given way largely to gray. His frame, once plumb and robust, is now gaunt and sickly.
He now speaks, and I shall endeavor to record every word he says.
"Ah," Grumper leaned back in his chair, his smile vanished as he took a breath. "Somehow I knew that is what you wanted."
"You are the oldest person to have known the Duke while he was alive," the stranger said, taking a seat and placing a hand on the desk's surface.
"And I can tell you most everything: who he was, what his childhood was like, how the years and tragedies changed him into what everyone knew him as," Grumper replied. "Yes, you could learn enough to satisfy a scholar's appetite from what I could tell you. But the question remains: what do I get in return?"
The stranger looked around and said, "I cannot spirit you from this cell. Only the Princess could do such a thing, and she will not."
"I didn't expect you to," Grumper whispered. "Even if I could escape, there's no place I could go. Everyone knows my face. Everyone knows what I did. If I walked out of here, I wouldn't survive a week before some citizen recognized me, slit my throat and left me for the mizzards in a filthy alley. For a hundred days, I was the right-hand of the Duke and no one will forget that."
Grumper paused, staring up at the dusty ceiling before turning back to the stacks of parchment lying on the writing desk. "If you can do this one thing for me, and this is my ardent wish. I will tell you everything you want to know, about the Duke, about myself and everything that happened, but only if you do this one thing for me."
"Yes?" the stranger replied. "Anything."
Grumper stood up and produced a stack of paper from one of the desk's drawers. "Take this, my life's work. It's only a matter of time before the Princess enters a lull where the distractions of rulership are thrown to the wayside, and she recalls that I am here. If I am to be executed, then what I have spent these long years writing might well be used to light my cremation fire."
Tenderly, almost reverently, the former chancellor of the kingdom of Oriana tied a length of leather cord together around the stack of notes and handed it across the desk.
The stranger took the stacks, eyes scanning the front pages. "You trust me with these?" the stranger asked.
"I have no one else now."
"I will see that these are properly preserved, and reproduced for the perusal of interested minds," the phantom said, and placed the paper in a leather bound satchel.
"It would be my sincerest hope. Now my half of the bargain," Grumper said with a slight sardonic chuckle. "You wanted to know the truth, and I shall tell you. For tonight you shall be my final confessor, and none of my sins will be left unspoken."
The stranger took the other chair, sat straight attentively as the former chancellor told his tale.