Catherine de' Medici watched her husband ride into a tournament wearing another woman's colours. He was carried out with a lance through his eye and called for his mistress from the bed where he was dying. Catherine refused to let Diane de Poitiers in. The queen had finally found a door she could close.
She crossed into England in a fishing boat at twenty-five and wrote to her cousin asking for help. She would not leave for nineteen years. She would not leave alive.
