A piece of Sile's novel in the progress of being revamped

I'd be happy to have any opinions! This is a piece of the beginning that I'm working in changing from third person to first, to see what effect it has. Like... making it better. Haha.


The house was screaming. I felt it in the walls, wailing through the skeleton of the house, violent piercing sounds that echoed through every inch of wood and plaster. It was a sudden and endless howl of pain that ripped me from an already restless sleep and left me sitting straight up in my bed, shaking with it.
“Margaret?” I called plaintively, although as soon as the name escaped me I knew she wasn’t there beside me. Hadn’t been there, in fact, for weeks. I moaned against the sound, quite alone and covering my ears in a fruitless gesture left over from childhood. It did no good; the sound was as much inside me as outside.
I kicked the pile of quilts away and swung my legs over the side of the bed, braving the cold of the house, my room and the floor all at once. When my feet touched I felt it instantly through the wood: Blood. Fear. Anger. From my feet I fell immediately to my hands and knees. I grunted as the house filled me with the scream, slightly less intense now and mixed with the night noises.
Henry snoring in the basement and Madame just below.
Boards creaking.
Wrongness. Something… fear.
Soft hiss of women’s sleeping breath.
Wind in the garden branches.
Drip.
Drip.
Blood.
Tears.
“Ohhh…. nooooo…..” I begged softly of the dark. “I can’t sleep when you do this. Stop it! Please? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Death makes a small sound when it becomes a tangible thought in someone’s mind. the house gave this thought to me, first. but it wasn’t my own.

No! Please! That’s not what I really wanted! Please, I’m afraid. I just wanted to be rid of it. Madame is angry and I’ve ruined everything, ruined myself. Oh dear God all this blood, what have I done? Help! Please somebody help!

Even as I named myself quite the baby, I began to weep. There were too many sounds and too many thoughts. And images, now. A small pink bean thing with dark eyes and little limbs like a newborn rat. It was swimming in darkness and Amelia was on the floor. It was her voice. Wailing, bleeding. And the house was angry.
The sound of women waking up.
Feet on the floor.
Heavier now, Madame was awake.
Amelia’s knees scraped the polished wood planks of the floor.
The door of Amelia’s room creaks open and Madame is there to grab her arms and wrench her to her feet.
“Not tonight, I can’t.”
I felt the heavy front door fall open like a sleeping mouth disturbed. And what seemed like only moments later there were carriage wheels and too much movement.
“Stop it!” I was desperate now. “Please. I’m so tired. Just let me sleep. It’ll be all right in the morning, you’ll see. You’ll see.”
There was another sound. A man in the house, now. Not a patron. No. Someone who didn’t belong. And he was no happier to be there than the house was to have him inside.
I couldn’t bear it. Above all of them in my dark attic room, my body gave up trying to fight and I was elsewhere before my face hit the floor.


Even on a quiet night, with Madame and the girls asleep, I was almost overcome with noise and had difficulty sleeping. Their breathing, their dreaming and even the shift and sigh of old wood filled me like my own sounds. And last night had been almost unbearable.
In the garden, Becky had turned back to the business of hanging the clothes, and was nearly done. One of the girls running through the yard at such a strange hour was no business of hers. And truthfully it was no business of mine, either. Though the thought of racing down the stairs and after her to offer some assistance did strike me, I knew that my work had best get done or it would be the worse for me when I had to wake Madame Mathilde.
A heavy and grass-muffled thump punctuated by the snapping of twigs and a very offensive word [ended her something something}
Being even more surprised than a few moments ago when I had seen Amelia crossing the garden in tears, I shoved my window open and peered straight down to where the sounds had come from.
“Good morning Lord Edward!” I said loudly to the man who had just landed in the hedge. Impertinently forgetting both my place and my manners, my voice sounded as though I wished him no such thing. Becky had turned around, startled both by Lord Edward’s sudden appearance in the garden and my own face hanging out the attic window. She looked dumbfounded for a moment, and then decided to ignore the both of us in favour of not getting involved. She swung a last, heavy petticoat over the rope and loped away through the kitchen door with the basket on her hip.
“Oh, good Lord,” the man mumbled, regaining his breath. “Of all the damned…” He didn’t acknowledge me, only continued a detailed list of obscenities and various ways he would like to be rid of the hedge he was having trouble climbing out of.
“Who are you talking to, Edward darling?” Another voice, this one practiced to a smooth and sugary invitation, called from the second story window that Lord Edward had just leapt ungratefully out of.
“It’s only me, Ellen” I answered for him. If any of the girls were awake to hear our voices, it would be less trouble if they only heard Ellen’s and mine. Her face appeared below. I had spoken only just loud enough to be heard. Ellen, however, did not. She lost her sweetness immediately and screeched angrily up at me.
“Only you, Baby-whore? Well, best you keep your little mouth closed about this, or I’ll scratch your pretty green eyes out!”
Ellen Croft, seductive in her disarray, was leaning out her bedroom window with a threatening expression pinched into her face. She looked as though she wanted to climb the wall like a spider and tear me to pieces right that second. I flinched.
“Now Ellen, sweet.” Lord Edward was dusting himself off and freeing his hair and clothing from bits of leaf and twig. He seemed to have just noticed the woman hanging out of the window and partly out of her gown. “Little Molly won’t say a word to Madame, will she? She’s just a child, after all. She knows her place.”
And though I reached out to catch the coin that he had tossed high into the air, thinking to secure my discretion, I felt the subtle threat in his voice even more strongly than in Ellen’s. Still feeling her hard glare, I pulled back inside the house and shut the window with rather more noise than I needed to, for the benefit of the two down below. Still, I heard Ellen’s hushed instructions as the Lord scrambled unceremoniously out of the garden; the slow scream of the gate sounded for the second time that morning.