Fanny thought the suggestion worth adopting. After careful
consideration, she drew up an advertisement:-"Fanny H. to L--H--. I have not been able to ascertain your address.
Please write to me, at the Post Office, Hunter Street, London, W.C."
She paid for the insertion of this advertisement three times on
alternate Saturdays. They told her that this would be a more likely way
than to take three successive Saturdays. Then, encouraged by the
feeling that something, however little, had been done, she resolved to
sit down to write out a narrative in which she would set down in order
everything that had happened--exactly as it had happened. Her intense
hatred and suspicion of Dr. Vimpany aided her, strange to say, to keep
to the strictest fidelity as regards the facts. For it was not her
desire to make up charges and accusations. She wanted to find out the
exact truth, and so to set it down that anybody who read her statement
would arrive at the same conclusion as she herself had done. In the
case of an eye-witness there are thousands of things which cannot be
produced in evidence which yet are most important in directing and
confirming suspicions. The attitude, the voice, the look of a speaker,
the things which he conceals as well as the things which he
reveals--all these are evidence. But these Fanny was unable to set
down. Therefore it behoved her to be strictly careful.
First, she stated how she became aware that there was some secret
scheme under consideration between Lord Harry and the doctor. Next, she
set down the fact that they began to talk French to each other,
thinking that she could not understand them; that they spoke of
deceiving Lady Harry by some statement which had already deceived the
authorities; that the doctor undertook to get the lady out of the
house; that they engaged herself as nurse to a sick man; that she
suspected from the beginning that their design was to profit in some
way by the death of this sick than, who bore a slight resemblance to
Lord Harry himself. And so on, following the story as closely as she
could remember, to the death of the Dane and her own subsequent
conversation with the nurse. She was careful to put in the dates, day
after day. When she had done all this--it took a good deal of time--she
bought a manuscript book and copied it all out. This enabled her to
remember two or three facts which had escaped her at the beginning.
Then she made another copy this time without names of people or place.
The second copy she forwarded as a registered letter to Mrs. Vimpany,
with a letter of which this was the conclusion: "Considering,
therefore, that on Wednesday morning I left Lord Harry in perfect
health; considering that on the Thursday morning I saw the man who had
been ill so long actually die--how, I have told you in the packet
enclosed; considering that the nurse was called in purposely to attend
a patient who was stated to have long been ill--there can be no doubt
whatever that the body in the cemetery is that of the unfortunate Dane,
Oxbye; and that, somewhere or other, Lord Harry is alive and well.