[2] Other accounts suggest her death in Nepal after fleeing with the Indian rebels, or her survival until 1907 having spent her life in seclusion at Cawnpore as wife of Ali Khan, who "was kind to her".
G. O. Trevelyan, in his book Cawnpore (1886), recounts the "impudent fabrication" that occurred after the Siege, with the "elastic memory" of "witnesses who will swear to anything" resulting in claims ranging from, on one hand, having seen Miss Wheeler emerging from Ali Khan's quarters carrying a sword and proclaiming her triumph over him, to on the other hand having witnessed her "taken out, dead and swollen" from the well into which by some accounts she cast herself after killing her captors.
Trevelyan, identifying Ali Khan as the source of the rumour of Miss Wheeler's defeat of her captor and subsequent suicide, lambasts the "ready credence" with which these varying stories were received in England, "the imaginations of men... excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions."
Trevelyan states that whilst these heroic stories circulated Miss Wheeler was in fact "living quietly in the family of her master under a Mohammedan name".
"[10] Per one account, in 1907 a missionary doctor was called to a Muslim household in the Cawnpore bazaar, where an "old, dying native woman"[11] requested the attendance of a Roman Catholic priest.