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."