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Chapter 7: An Exceptional Exhibit
The City Museum was hardly the equal of the Smithsonian but Aaron Rodwell, the museum’s director, did try to put on exhibitions that would capture the popular imagination. One hundred and fifty years since the death of Hiram B. Heron was hardly the most important of anniversaries, he knew, but at least it was something to promote. And at least Rodwell knew he had come up with the ideal, eye-catching, centre piece to pull in the crowds. Maxine Connor, the museum’s curator, probably wouldn’t approve, of course.
By celebrating Heron, Rodwell knew he would earn some kudos with the College. Heron had been one of its founding fathers, so anything with a Heron association found favour with the Faculty. Luckily, the director discovered, Heron had left a bequest of his ethnographic collection to the museum. They’d never really bothered to look at it before but when they’d gone through the boxes in the museum’s warehouse they’d found a curious collection of specimens and artefacts from Heron’s Indian expeditions and, in one small velvet lined wooden box, the largest emerald that the director had ever seen.
“It must be priceless,” Maxine Connor had said, peering in awe at the great green gem and the item had at once become the focus of the exhibition in Rodwell’s mind.
“I know just how to display it,” Rodwell smirked. Maxine looked at him cautiously. She knew to be wary when Rodwell started on one of his enthusiasms. The only good side of them was they tended to divert his attention from his attempts to corner her in one corner or other of the museum’s archives, in the hope that his advances might finally be returned. “You’ve seen all those stuffed snakes that Heron collected? I think a jewel in a snake pit has the right ‘Indiana Jones’ flavour for a display that would get the public in – and television too.”
“Can’t see people getting excited by a lot of stuffed snakes,” the curator said sniffily, resistant as ever to the Director’s ideas of ‘exciting’ displays for the public. Her own ideas on exhibitions tended to the academic rather than the popular. She admitted that you had to make things accessible to as wide an audience as possible but that didn’t seem to be any reason to demean the value of scholarship to her.
“No, indeed, Maxine, but suppose they were real snakes? Suppose I had prevailed upon my colleagues at the City Zoo to loan us a case of highly poisonous Indian snakes for a tableau of how Heron must have come across the jewel.”
“I don’t remember reading anything about that in his journals, Director.”
“No? Well it’s more of an interpretation, if you like. Something that could have happened...”
“Oh,” said Maxine, nodding knowingly, “Fiction.”
“It will bring in visitors,” Aaron Rodwell responded. “I’ve arranged it, you just need to work out the rest of the exhibits. Unless, you’re afraid of snakes, of course. Is that the sort of girly thing you suffer from?” Rodwell smiled in a way that seemed calculated to antagonise Maxine.
For her part, Maxine, convinced that Rodwell’s rudeness was the product of his feelings of intellectual inferiority, bit her tongue.
****** ***** ******
Gregg was walking to college on his usual route. He still kept having these curious memory lapses that coincided with the most disturbing dreams but he tried not to let them interfere with his studies, or with his new found interest in his acquisitions from the shop on the harbour.
The two banners outside the museum said, “Into The East – The Explorations of Hiram B Heron”. Gregg stopped, surprised that the author of the book he had been reading should suddenly be the subject of an exhibition here. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d been inside the museum – when he was a kid probably – and his main recollection was of tall glass cases and endless rows of pottery, glass and wooden items that had little meaning for him.
A picture of the be-whiskered Heron stared down from the left hand banner while on the right hand banner was a picture of something that Gregg found even more interesting, a great green jewel that was cut, as far as Gregg could tell, in just the same way as the red one that he possessed.
Gregg stepped into the museum’s foyer and picked up a flyer for the exhibition. It had the dates. It had the times. It even had the invitation, “See the Great Heron Emerald in the Pit of Vipers”. Gregg’s first thought was that the exhibition might be worth a look, if only to see if he could learn more about the Swami. It was only as he carried on reading the flyer as he walked towards the college that he thought, “If that’s an emerald; can the thing I’ve got possibly be a ruby?”
As he looked at the picture he felt himself being taken over by the feelings of lust and greed that he had felt when confronted by Mrs Armitage and the girl in the Library. It was no ordinary sense of desire; it was a compulsion, an overwhelming certainty confronting him that he would have the jewel.
© Freddie Clegg 2010
All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or reposted without permission
All characters fictitious
E-mail: freddie_clegg@yahoo.com
Web Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freddies_tales/
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