The Dorabella Cipher (Part 2)

Elgar seems to have been so familiar with his cipherbet, that he even was able to quickly write some notes or annotations. Which means, that he either learned this cipherbet by heart or he could quickly derivate the corresponding ciphersymbol from a given letter. And if so, why shouldn't it be possible that he quickly writes to Penny the more or less irrelevant note

  "P.S. Now drocp beige weeds set in it – bure idiocy – one endtire bed! Luigi Ccibunud lu'ngly tuned liuto studo two."

or reinterpreted 

"P.S. Now droop beige weeds set in it - pure idiocy - one entire bed! Luigi Ccibunud luv'ngly tuned liuto studo two."

as Tim Roberts solution suggests? In Figure 1 one can the three Pigpen circles for his solution.

Figure 1. The Pigpen circles for T. Roberts solution.

The red marked letters indicate symbols that are not used in the Dorabella cipher. Of course, he did not use this representation but used the key setence "LADY PENNY, WRITING IN CODE IS SUCH BUSY WORK", but this is how it would look like.

Figure 2. The cipherbet of Roberts (borrowed from www.ciphermysteries.com)

Applying this cipherbet to the Liszt-Fragement yields gibberish, which is not surprisingly, since he seems to (if Roberts is right) have choosen a special version for this Dorabella cipher.

To be honest, the chances that Robert's recovered plaintext is wrong is nearly negligible. If a simple monoalphabetic substitution of a ciphertext yields not only english words but also in a meaningful order, than it is hardly to believe that to be just accidential. There are so many letter-dependencies within in the text, that it this has to be correct somehow.

So, albeit i think it is overall the correct solution, it still bothers me that there are some shortcomings in its explanation.

In 1896, the Pall Mall Magazine published a code challenge, said to be "uncrackable", which finally was solved by E. Elgar. It was the Nihilist cipher and he was so proud of his solution that he painted it later on a wooden floor. He explained the solution on a set of nine cards (the Courage card set). On the first of these cards he drew the symbols:

Figure 3. The symbols from the Courage card set. Order unknown.

I am not sure if the order is correct. Since this is a full rotation of the 3-cusps symbols concatenated with the two other symbols in upright direction, its hard to believe that this encodes a word. What could have be his intention to draw this symbols on that card set?