Excerpt from The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The king, Leontes, scrutinised the queen's face.

'But yet, Paulina,' he said, 'Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this seems.'

'So much the more our carver's excellence,' Paulina responded, 'which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her as she lived now.'

Kemp watched Hermione blinking and wondered if it was possible to train the eyelids to behave.

Leontes continued to admire the statue, oblivious to its blinking. The younger actress, clearly the king's daughter both in life and in the play, knelt at the foot of the statue. 'Dear queen, that ended when I but began, give me that hand of yours to kiss.' Kemp felt behind him for the wall and was glad of its support.

Would a statue of Louisa be a fitting tribute or another painful failure?

When his focus returned to the play, Leontes was saying to another man, 'See, my lord, would you not deem it breathed? And that those veins did verily bear blood?'

Paulina made to draw the curtain on the statue, but Leontes stopped her. 'I am sorry, sir,' Paulina said, 'I have thus far stirr'd you: but I could afflict you farther.'

'Do, Paulina,' Leontes said, 'for this affliction has a taste as sweet as any cordial comfort. Still, methinks, there is an air comes from her: what fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?'

Kemp looked at The Carpenter again, squeezed into the stalls, straining to see over the heads of those in front of him. It seemed an unlikely place for a recluse. But if Begg was to be believed, he'd been on hand to secure Sandow's statue when it arrived at the train station the day before.

'If you can behold it,' Paulina was now saying, 'I'll make the statue move indeed, descend and take you by the hand; but then you'll think — which I protest against — I am assisted by wicked powers.'

Leontes begged her to continue and Paulina, facing the audience directly, said, 'It is required you do awake your faith.' Stirring music began from the orchestra pit as Paulina urged the statue to come to life. With evident relief the actress playing Hermione began to stir. She reached out for the king's hand and stepped down from her pedestal.

'O, she's warm!' proclaimed Leontes. 'If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.'

The couple embraced and after one last speech from the king the players all left the stage, returning to receive their applause and take their bow.

The master of ceremonies returned, rubbing his hands together greedily.

'And now, fine people of Maru-maru,' he said, pronouncing the town's name as if it were two separate words, 'the time has come for the pinnacle of the performance, the strength of the show. But first I must beg your patience as the stage is prepared for the many feats the Great Sandow will perform.'

The same two stage hands who had rolled The Winter's Tale's background onstage came and rolled it off, though this time they were garbed in white togas and Roman sandals. Joined by four more men similarly attired — two of whom had been in the previous vignette — they began placing wooden crates on the stage in a deliberate fashion. When the boxes were all arranged, the mock Romans removed items with brief flourishes — dumb-bells, barbells, chains, large bands of elastic, lengths of wood — the audience gasping with each revelation. The two strongest-looking men, possibly disciples of Sandow, each carried a large basket on stage and held them still as a third man fixed a steel rod between them. When everything had been arranged the men left and the curtain was lowered.

Kemp took this moment, while the rest of the crowd murmured with excitement, to consider again the challenge of a Winter's Tale window display: the spirals of artifice of having a wooden mannequin standing in for an actress pretending to be a marble statue (possibly enchanted) of the queen. How he longed for Louisa to be his sounding board, his collaborator. To sketch the scene he saw in his head so that he might see the flaws in the arrangement of the figures. But it would flounder, he realised, without the perfect Hermione. Such a mannequin was beyond his capabilities. He looked at his bandaged forefinger, which began to throb on cue.

From The Mannequin Makersby Craig Cliff (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2017). Copyright © 2013 by Craig Cliff. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org