Free The White Plague by Frank Herbert

Lough Derg cottage “when it doesn’t interfere with my schedule.” He had handed over the keys with a laugh and the admonition: “Leave the place neat and do try to get in a little time for study. I’d tike you with me someday, Stephen. You have a talent for solving unusual problems… such as this one.”
    As Peard had expected, Stephen blushed – as much from the praise as from the conspiracy.
    The car they took was a tiny green Fiat whose use Stephen had earned tutoring its owner in the niceties of kidney function, a subject that baffled the Fiat’s owner until Stephen hit on the stratagem of a large drawing with signposts on pins through which the student was required to maneuver a tiny cardboard automobile labeled “foreign matter.” It amused Stephen and Kate to call the Fiat “foreign matter” as they drove north.
    A few minutes before noon they crossed the narrow old stone bridge into Killaloe. The castellated tower of St. Flannery’s Cathedral stood out like a Norman sentinel against a gathering of clouds on the horizon. The sky overhead was blue, however, and the lake was a blue-and-emerald mirror to the surrounding hills, its surface rippled by a light wind and the passage of a quartet of swans.
    Just north of Killaloe, Stephen stopped at a roadside “gypsy stand” for sandwiches, chips and beer, which they ate in the meadow beside the mound where Brian Bora had raised his castle. Their picnic site looked down on Ballyvalle Ford where Patrick Sarsfield and his six hundred troopers had crossed the Shannon on the night of August 10, 1690, during the Siege of Limerick.
    Kate, fascinated by her nation’s history and a little awed to be “in this very place,” began regaling Stephen with the story of Sarsfield’s ride when she found him unfamiliar with the details. Watching her color rise as she talked about that “wonderful, futile ride” against the Williamite siege train, Stephen looked longingly at the concealing shade of the trees that hid the circular foundation of Brian Boru’s castle, wondering if Kate might agree to walk into that sheltering bower with him for a time. But he could hear children shouting at the lake below the meadow, and the picnic site soon was buzzing with flies attracted by the food. They wolfed their food and ran back to the car, pursued by the flies.
    In the shelter of the car, Kate looked back at the meadow and surprised Stephen with a mystical side of her nature that he had not suspected.
    “Terrible things were done in that place, Stephen. I can feel it. Could the flies be the souls of the evil men who did those terrible things?”
    “Ahhh, now, Kate! What a thing to say.”
    She did not really cheer up until they turned down the graveled track to the cottage and she saw the old double chimney pot above the trees. When they entered the cottage, she was almost childlike in her admiration.
    Stephen, who had come to understand and enjoy most of her moods, took a positive delight in showing her around. The kitchen had been remodeled from its old farmhouse days, a large window added on the lakeside, every piece of equipment not only modern but the best available.
    Kate put her hands to her cheeks as she looked at it. “Oh, Stephen, if only we can have a house like this.”
    “We will, someday, Kate.”
    She turned and hugged him.
    Outside, there was a small orchard and an area set off by stones for a kitchen garden. The barn stood on the far side of the orchard. It was a stone building with a new corrugated metal roof, and was easily half again as big as the house. A tall growth of weeds lapped against the stone sides of the barn but the path from the house through the orchard to a small side door was clear and neatly trimmed at the borders.
    Stephen unlocked the padlock and swung the door open for Kate. He flipped the light switch beside the door as she stepped through. Brilliant illumination flooded the one large room, pouring down from banks of reflectors suspended