"Madame Pearl," the interviewer asked Grumper. "Who is that, if I may ask?"
"You are a stranger," Grumper said. "I thought everyone in every hamlet, village and shanty in all of Oriana knew who the magnificent and wise and benevolent Madame Pearl is." There was the blunt edge of sarcasm as the former Chancellor spoke.
"The name and title has the air of familiarity. I might have come across that name during my researches. I will attempt later to check my sources, but in the meantime please provide me with your view and opinion on this individual you speak of."
"Gladly," Grumper replied. "Ah, yes, the great and miraculous Madame Pearl, knower and keeper of the sacred, eternal mysteries of the Kingdom, Seer of the Future's Bright Paths, and Diviner of the Fates and Fortunes of men. Honestly, I don't know where the King found her, but she had quickly ingratiated herself to him with her divinations on her cards. He trusted her, and later passed that trust to his daughter, to whom Pearl was like a mother. Like her father, the Princess always heeded the advice of that...that charlatan."
"Just about everything about her succeeded in irritating me. I loathed the sound of her accented voice with that weak tremor. I despise those watery eyes behind those crystal glasses that she wore all the time. I don't even think she needed them. She wore that old dress, shawl and hat of straw, as though she were a pious and humble martyr, when in fact she was pocketing golden coins from the treasury when she thought no one was looking."
"She couldn't have been entirely without merit," the visitor asked.
"About the only thing that did not irritate me was her height. She was about the same height as me, and with that defect at least I could sympathize. The rest of her was so frail, so weak, and yet so deceiving. She was cunning, that one. Deceiving, yes. In one conversation, she could convince you to listen to her prophecies, as though everything depended upon you doing so. She could read people, and when necessary act as though everything she said to them was of vital importance - that they absolutely needed to what she had to say."
Grumper paused, his eyes acquired a far away look. He then said, "Let me confess something."
"Please," the interviewer said. "That is why I am here, after all."
"Previously I had said that the safety of my personal papers was my ardent wish," Grumper said. "That is still true, but I have a secondary wish, and that is simply this: I wish that I could see what Madame Pearl is doing right this very instant."
"And why would you want to observe that?"
"Oh, you see that after my "betrayal" of the royal house of Oriana (an untruth that I will clarify for the record in great detail; I was always loyal to the true wearer of the crown) - and imprisonment, I heard that it was Pearl who occupied my position as Chancellor of the kingdom, in addition to already being the Princess's spiritual advisor. If I can close my eyes, I can just imagine her sitting at my desk, attempting to bring order to the chaos of incoming reports, requests, and official papers. I'm sure the experience of attempting to fill my shoes is driving her simply mad - mad as a crystal dragon on its 300th birthday. It very nearly drove me insane when I was Chancellor, and I went to the finest schools that were supposed to prepare me for such things. Madame Pearl is...well, to put it bluntly, simply out of her league. A lifetime of shuffling tarot cards prepares one for administration in the same that eating nothing but goreaferr meat prepares one for the sports arena. She should have trained herself to read triplicate forms instead of tea leaves. You can't learn to balance the treasury by staring into a ball of hewn crystal."
Grumper paused to catch his breath from the tirade, and then continued, speaking in a low voice.
"All she ever did was speak of her divining of the future, and yet the Duke and I had her thrown into a birdcage. Obviously her talents for far-sight didn't help her then. I would say more about her capture and richly-deserved imprisonment and humiliation, but that's a story for another time."
"Let me just say this," Grumper said. "She fooled me once...just once. And never again did I trust her after that. After that time, I knew that she was poison. If only Pearl hadn't been there advising the Princess in every matter, things would have turned out quite different. I might have been able to convince her, to make her listen to the needs of the people and the kingdom. What happened need not to have happened at all. But her hold on the Princess was just too strong. Pearl was like her mother, and everyone wants to believe their mother. Who was I? Just a little man whose spent his days filling out paperwork. I was ignored."
There was a moment of silence.
"In any case. That's enough of that for now" Grumper said. "Allow me now to tell of an amusing incident that occurred when I attempted to leave the Duke's cell…"